Page 1 of The Prince Without Sorrow

Prologue

Jaya

S HE HAD EXPECTED HER LIFE TO END THIS WAY.

Bound, gagged, and paralysed – waiting for the sweet release of death. Such was the fate of all mayakari – witches – under the reign of Emperor Adil, ruler of the vast Ran Empire.

She squeezed her eyes shut, unwilling to turn her head to her side. Two other mayakari were already burning next to her, their bodies almost unidentifiable now, a blue flame engulfing their remains. She smelled cooking flesh and tamped down nausea that came raging up her throat like a river snake through a stream. At least they had only caught three.

She prayed to the spirits that her niece had escaped the village with her life. It was better to die old than young, and they needed the next generation of witches to live.

‘Open your eyes, mayakari.’

A deep, rough voice stirred her out of her fervent prayers. A man stood before her, tall and muscular, carrying a longsword, a golden circlet decorating his head.

Emperor Adil.

She was surprised that he was here in person, visiting a small, insignificant town like theirs. But then she remembered why soldiers were here in the first place: the extensive mines to their village’s east, its iron ore crumbling upon touch, unable to be used and sent to the capital to make steel.

It sounded as if mayakari magic had been at play, and it rarely was.

She could almost sense his loathing, a seething darkness in him, as if the sheer hatred of her and her kind coursed like wildfire through his veins.

‘Don’t be a coward,’ he drawled. ‘I want you to gaze upon the world as you burn.’

She did not want to give him this. She didn’t want to give him anything at all. Yet, she opened her eyes and found herself staring into his as they gleamed. He was gleeful, triumphant in the face of all this death.

She wanted to curse him. To use her abilities to gift misery to the Ran Empire’s ruler. But she could not. It was not the mayakari way. They were women who used their power to maintain peace, not sow seeds of destruction, it was their code, a mark of their livelihood. Their ability to speak to nature spirits, curse the living, and raise the dead were already powers that humans were wary of, and had kept an uneasy balance between fear and respect when it came to the mayakari. But being blamed for the disastrous Seven Day Flood over a decade ago had been the tipping point.

Emperor Adil’s doing had caused them to be seen as nothing more than terrors in the night that deserved to be burned. How typical – the powerful fearing power they didn’t understand.

Even at the end of things, she wished for nothing against him. Karma would find him one day; such was the inevitable, endless cycle of retribution.

As the emperor grasped a flaming torch and prepared to toss it at her oil-soaked body, she listened to him. She gazed at the world she lived in, understood the violence with which she would die and accepted it. Death would be easier than this.

She thought of her niece, a little bird in this brutal landscape, and she hoped she would remember, despite everything, the lessons she had given her. That anger solved nothing, that violence hurt those who wielded it as a weapon.

Find peace little bird , she thought as the tendrils of flame licked at her toes. Find peace and let me go.