For the Crown and the Dragon
Low-born officer Taliesin leads murderers and gutter-scum against armies, sorcerers, assassins and beastmen.
About this book
A one-eyed captain. A company of criminals. A secret that could topple an Empire. Flintlock fantasy with a weird-fiction twist — Book One of the Triple Realm duology.
In the Triple Realm, civilisation is a fragile island surrounded by the Tumble — a vast, enchanted forest of “weirded” beasts and nightmare logic. Captain Taliesin is no hero: a low-born rogue leading the Dragon-browns, a company of pressed thieves, murderers and orphans who do the dirty work for the high-born “Qualities”. They are the first into the breach and the last to get paid.
When a brutal siege ends in a supernatural assassination by an impossible “weirdsman”, Taliesin and his squad are thrust into a game of shadows. Queen Annan Pendrag's petulant sister has vanished into the lawless east, and the Queen's grip on the throne is built on a lie that is beginning to crack. From steam-powered “kettle-black” war machines to the chameleon-skinned Dagda of the deep woods, Taliesin must navigate political treachery and ancient sorcery.
He isn't fighting for honour or the crown — he's fighting to keep his men alive in a land where the forest itself wants them dead.
The opening of the Triple Realm duology and the doorway into one of Hunt's strangest, grittiest settings — a world where the Roman Empire met steampunk magic, told from the point of view of the expendable men at the bottom.
- you like Joe Abercrombie's grit and Bernard Cornwell's soldiers;
- you want military fantasy told from the headcount up, not the throne down;
- you enjoy a “Dirty Dozen” of lovable, expendable rogues.