In his acclaimed first novel, The Red Wolf Conspiracy , Robert V. S. Redick launched the gargantuan ship Chathrand and its motley crew of misfits, murderers, and monsters toward a landfall that may exist only in legend. Now Redick masterfully ratchets up the suspense with deep intrigue, ancient powers, and shocking new revelations. Though the immediate plans of the dark sorcerer Arunis have been thwarted, the battle for control of the Chathrand, on which the fate of empires hinges, is far from over. On board, a small band of allies bound together less by trust than by desperate need scrambles for a means to defeat the conspiracy, while the nobleborn Thasha Isiq and the lowly deckhand Pazel Pathkendle find themselves unwillingly drawn inward to the plot’s core—and into a deadly game that will force them to make hard sacrifices. The wizard Ramachni has left the travelers and retreated to his own world to nurse his battle wounds, but Arunis remains at large—weakened, yet still a terrifying foe. More pressing is the conspiracy of the Arquali Emperor, his chief assassin, Sandor Ott, and the Chathrand’s notorious captain, Nilus Rose, to use the dawn wedding of Thasha and a Mzithrin prince as a signal to launch a war.     With every move they make, Thasha and her compatriots find that they have more to lose—especially the deposed ixchel queen, Diadrelu, and the woken rat, Felthrup, who each harbor terrible secrets they dare not reveal. Worst of all is a hidden, festering horror lurking in the hold of the Chathrand. A danger that not even Ramachni could have foreseen, it is the twisted product of a malevolent power determined to pull down the pillars of the world.       Now, as the Chathrand sets course through the uncharted waters of the vast and mysterious Ruling Sea , the fragile bonds of trust and love beginning to form between the unlikely allies will be tested to the breaking point—by unspeakable terrors, magical wonders, and shattering betrayals that dwarf anything that has come before. The second book in an appealing trilogy continues the adventures on and around the great ship Chathrand. Imperial Princess Thasha stands with her bridegroom before the priest for a wedding that is supposed to seal peace between longstanding enemies. She is not expected to survive, for behind the nuptials seethe multiple plots and intrigues. The imperial spymaster is trying to start a civil war; the Chathrand’s captain is mad and serves an evil sorcerer; the tiny Ixchel have their own plans. After escaping death by a hair, Thasha and her comrades face a voyage across the Ruling Sea, which is so vast that only the Chathrand can cross it, and whose southern border is unknown. Redick keeps a good grip on characters and the vast, detailed, action-packed story, and it isn’t quite necessary to have read The Red Wolf Conspiracy (2008) to keep track of who is doing what to whom. --Frieda Murray   “Robert Redick is an extraordinary talent.” — New York Times , author Karen Miller Robert V. S. Redick is the author of The Red Wolf Conspiracy . His unpublished first novel, Conquistadors , was a finalist for the AWP/Thomas Dunne Novel Award, and his essay “Uncrossed River” won the New Millennium Writings Award for nonfiction. A former theater critic and international development researcher, he worked most recently for the antipoverty organization Oxfam. He lives in western Massachusetts. Chapter One Dawn 7 Teala 941 86th day from Etherhorde (Treaty Day—six hours earlier) “Eyes open, Neda.” The Father had come to her alone. He held his own cup and candle, and he smiled at the girl asleep on the granite slab under the woolen shift, who obeyed him and smiled in kind and yet did not wake or stir. Her eyes when they winked open were blue; he had seen nothing like them in any other living face. A strand of weed in her hair. Dry streaks of salt water on her neck and forehead. Like his other children she had spent the night in the sea. She was twenty-two, the man six times her age, unbent, unwearied, his years betrayed only in the whiteness of his beard and in the voice deep and traveled and kindly and mad. The girl knew that he was mad, and knew also that the day she revealed such knowledge by glance or sigh or question would be the day she died. She knew many secret things. Until the Father woke her she would sleep like the other aspirants, but there was a disobedient flame in her that gleamed on, thought on, insensible to his orders. She wished it out. She tried to snuff it with meditation, inner exorcisms, prayers: it danced on, full of heresies and mirth. And because the Father could peer into her mind as through a frosted window it was but a matter of time before he saw it. Perhaps he saw it now, this very minute. Perhaps he was considering her fate. She loved him. She had never loved another thus. It was not an earthly or a simple love but he could read its contours in her sleeper’s smile as he had on his children’s faces