Fate's Arrow (The Rising Wave Book 3)

FATE’S ARROW RISING WAVE MICHELLE DIENER Copyright © 2023 by Michelle Diener All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Cover Design: Creative Paramita Created with Vellum THE RISING WAVE SERIES The Rising Wave (Prequel Novella) The Turncoat King The Threadbare Queen Fate’s Arrow ABOUT FATE’S ARROW A dark force at work Ava and Luc are asked to head north to Skäddar, a move necessary to save the alliance they have created with the mountainous country. Something terrible is killing Skäddar villagers and leaving messages behind with their bodies that the deaths will continue as long as the Skäddar are in alliance with the Rising Wave. If Ava and Luc can’t convince the Skäddar Collective to stand up for their new friendship in the face of the tragedy, they will lose a vital ally in the region. A dark room to cage a prisoner Massi is deep inside Grimwalt, successful in her mission to find Ava’s incarcerated friends, Tomas and Velda. But the two are not being held alone. Massi finds many others being kept with them, as well as a prisoner kept in darkness whose power shines so bright, Massi can’t imagine how the Speaker imprisoned him to begin with. A dark cloud that needs to be dispelled Duncan has been held far from his home on the Skäddar border, and he takes the chance of escape that Massi gives him with both hands. When he and Massi have to part ways, though—Massi to get Ava’s friends to safety, him to return to the forest he was ripped away from—he can’t deny his attraction to the fierce archer, or his reluctance to let her go. But when he gets home, and finds the power of his domain is being used to commit terrible atrocities, he’ll need Massi’s help, and those of her friends, to rid Grimwalt of the blight that is trying to take hold. Fate’s Arrow is the third book in the Rising Wave series. The series begins with The Rising Wave, a prequel novella, and continues with The Turncoat King and The Threadbare Queen. CONTENTS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Epilogue Breakaway: Excerpt Also by Michelle Diener About the Author Acknowledgments CHAPTER 1 Duncan lay on stone. Damp, dead stone. He had not managed to find a way to escape it. Yet. Not that he’d managed to escape even before he’d been chained to a stone floor. But he had been close, and they had known it. They had moved him here a month ago. Maybe. Time had begun to lose meaning. He brushed his fingertips over the cold, hard surface. There was nothing here for his magic to latch onto. At least before, even if he knew it would do him no good, he could feel the spark inside him. But the rock was dead. There was, however, one single upside to the move. Now he was in the middle of the prison. Surrounded by the other inmates, where before he’d been kept on his own, separate and isolated in his own hut. The hut had been in poor condition, and had been set near the fortress wall, with the forest right up against it on the other side. It had been a sweet madness to have the keys to his escape so close, and maybe he had gone a little crazy at the end, trying ways to escape that he would never have considered had he not been desperate. They had decided he might just manage to do it. So now the whisper of the trees and the smell of growing things was gone, replaced by the murmurs and weeping and conversations of his fellow prisoners, deep in the heart of the prison. He had missed the sound of human voices, he realized. He hadn’t been around people much since he had come fully into his power at seventeen, but the few encounters he had day to day had been more important to him than he’d realized, until they were taken away. Some of those trapped with him wondered about him. About why he was chained up like a rabid wolf in the central tower. Others saw his treatment as just more of the same cruelty that had put them in this place along with him. Some tried to speak to him, and he welcomed the contact. It humbled him to realize that he was the same as everyone else. Despite what he’d told himself, he needed contact, too. Needed to find connections. And he suspected most of those around him were like-minded citizens of Grimwalt. Some might even be as magical as he was. This was the Speaker’s way of hiding his dirty secrets. The way more and more people had arrived in the time he’d been chained here, shocked and shaking with fear and, sometimes, anger, at their unjust imprisonment, those secrets had to be getting harder and harder to keep. A shoe scraped against the stone of the floor, and Duncan went still. “Dunc.” Tomas kept his voice to a loud whisper. Duncan rolled up into a crouch. “Catch.” Tomas tossed him a piece of bread, and even though the light from the torch far down the passage barely reached his cell, Duncan snatched it from the air out of instinct. He glanced at it, then looked up at the old man on the other side of