Contents
Copyright
Dedication
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CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
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About the Author
Note from the Author
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Warrior’s Burden: Saga of the Known Lands Book 1
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Copyright © 2021 Jacob Nathaniel Peppers. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
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For my children, Gabriel and Norah
I have been very lucky in my life, very blessed
But out of all the blessings I’ve received—largely undeserved—
There are none I am more thankful for than the privilege of being your father.
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CHAPTER ONE
He was a prince, yes, but that was the least of him.
More, he was a tradesman.
As dedicated to his craft as any smith with hours spent hunched at his labors, his hammer in hand.
Yet, his craft was not to create but to destroy, for his tool was his axe.
And his trade was death.
—Exiled Historian to the Crown, Petran Quinn
The woods were dark and seemed to stretch on forever all around him, the snow a heavy blanket at his feet. The forest was so choked with trees that a man would not have been able to see more than a dozen feet in a straight line, if there had been light. But there was not. None, at least, save for the pale light of the moon overhead, hanging thick and pregnant in the sky. It was full tonight, and that was no good thing.
A full moon meant danger, meant that those things which lurked in the darkness were stronger, their will pressing close against the world. Or so the man had been taught, long ago, while bouncing on his mother’s knee, listening to stories, some of brave warriors meant to engender courage, some of the things they faced, meant to engender caution.
But he was a child no longer. Those days were long passed, and the man was older now than his mother had ever been, older, too, than his father had been on the night when those stories had stopped being only stories, when he had seen, firsthand, the truth of what the darkness held.
He had doubted the stories when he was a child, but the man he had become doubted no longer. The bogeymen of his mother’s stories, the demons and devils about which she had warned him did exist. He knew this.
After all, he had seen them. He had watched, helpless, as they had clawed at the foundations of his life, his world, until it had fallen away beneath him, had sent him plummeting into the darkness.
But even had he been ignorant of the truth, even had he not seen it first hand, he would have known that tonight was a night of danger. He could feel the tingle of it in his hands as he worked them against the cold, could taste it in the breath as it went in and out of his lungs. The air was cool, frigid, and full of anticipation, as if the world was waiting. And what it waited for—what it always waited for—was blood. It waited, but it did not wonder, for the story had been told countless times in countless places, and the conclusion was always the same. It waited for blood. And it would have it.
There in the woods, with the snow falling, its thick blanket muting all sound, with the shadows of the great trees pressing close around him, it seemed to him that he was the only person in the world. There was nothing else. Nothing—save the man and the corpse at his feet.
And the knife, of course. There was always the knife. The man stood for a moment, not appreciating the stillness of the moment—for the man he had become appreciated nothing, no longer remembered how—but acknowledging it as he had so many times before in so many different places. With so many different corpses.
The frost coating his leggings cracked and shifted as he knelt before the corpse. An elk, a large one. The pride of its herd, with wide, powerful horns, and a thick, muscular chest. He had always thought them majestic, proud beasts, but the arrow had stolen more than just its life, had stolen its grace, its beauty, and now it was just
