Daughters of Bronze

Lost between the timeless lines of Homer’s epic, the women of Troy finally stand to be counted. Their story is one you’ve never encountered, and it will change the fate of Troy forever. Andromache has proven herself a capable leader, but can she maintain that hard-won status now that she is the mother to the city’s long-awaited heir? With enemies closing in, Andromache must bring together a divided city in time to make a final stand. Rhea is a Trojan spy, but she never expected to find love in the enemy camp. When the final battle lines are drawn, Rhea must decide where her loyalties lie and how much she is willing to lose. Helen is no longer the same broken woman first brought to Troy as a captive. Given a second chance at life, she must cast off her shroud of grief and use her healing gifts to save Troy’s greatest hope. Cassandra has seen Troy’s fate. But she knows the truth is only as valuable as the person who tells it . . . and few in Troy value her. All that is about to change. One hero will rise, another will fall . . . and this time, Cassandra will have her say. From the highest tower to the most humble alley, the bloody beaches to the dusty plain, <Daughters of Bronze

Autorentext

A. D. Rhine

Klappentext

**Song of great sorrow. Even greater love.
**
Lost between the timeless lines of Homer’s epic, the women of Troy finally stand to be counted. Their story is one you’ve never encountered, and it will change the fate of Troy forever.

Andromache has proven herself a capable leader, but can she maintain that hard-won status now that she is the mother to the city’s long-awaited heir? With enemies closing in, Andromache must bring together a divided city in time to make a final stand.

Rhea is a Trojan spy, but she never expected to find love in the enemy camp. When the final battle lines are drawn, Rhea must decide where her loyalties lie and how much she is willing to lose.

Helen is no longer the same broken woman first brought to Troy as a captive. Given a second chance at life, she must cast off her shroud of grief and use her healing gifts to save Troy’s greatest hope.

Cassandra has seen Troy’s fate. But she knows the truth is only as valuable as the person who tells it . . . and few in Troy value her. All that is about to change. One hero will rise, another will fall . . . and this time, Cassandra will have her say.

From the highest tower to the most humble alley, the bloody beaches to the dusty plain, Daughters of Bronze is the thrilling conclusion to the duology that began with Horses of Fire, and **breathes life into the Troy of myth and history. It is an epic of a thousand invisible actions leading to a single moment, adding a refrain of unexpected light to the legend of Troy.

Leseprobe
1

Rhea

A cry pierces the night.

My bones absorb the jagged note.

I press myself flat to the ground as a winged army erupts from the tall grasses all around me. They take to the air above the Lisgar Swamp. Birds. A hundred feathers blocking out the moon. Only when they melt into the darkness do I see what flies high above their wings.

It burns across the night. Head of fire and a tail of flame. Glowing scales of molten color only the gods can name.

A serpent in the sky.

Half-remembered stories from my childhood rise up in the silence. Pieces of Phrygian prayers and old Hittite songs that spoke of eternal winters. Of sheets of ice that became floods of rain to drown the world. Death and rebirth that left even the mountains scattered as dust upon the wind. A shudder runs through me despite the sticky summer heat.

I rise from the grass. This time, the warning is not a sound, but a feeling.

Movement to the west. Tall reeds swaying in the opposite direction of the wind. One shadow separates from the others.

He is not wearing armor, but the outline of a spear is visible over his shoulder. A mane of long, lank hair tumbles down his back. He stands, staring at the place where the fire serpent lingers on the horizon.

I count two hundred twenty-seven breaths before the sentry melts back into the shadows of the Scamander plain.

A hundred breaths more, and I slip over the hill that overlooks the Achaeans' camp on Sigeum Ridge, where the invaders have been camped the ten long years of this war. The moon drifts back behind the clouds, drenching the swamp and hidden lattice that forms a secret path across it in darkness, but every one of the steps I take is part of a dance I can perform now with my eyes closed.

A hulking monolith takes shape out of the gloom to my right. The stones sing to me with their own beguiling magic, but I force myself to move past the ancient shrine to gods long forgotten without looking back.

My basket waits in a clump of bushes just before the latrines. Tucking it under my arm, I step out into the camp and blink against the brightness of a hundred fires.

On my way to the bathhouse, I pass Agamemnon's settlement. Then Menelaus's. One after another, I list off the names of the Achaean kings until, finally, I draw near the camp closest to the Kesik Cut.

The gates outside Odysseus's settlement are barred to outsiders, as they've been since the Ithacans' failed attempt to trap Troy's people behind burning walls last spring. The Lower City would have fallen then but for my mistress, Harsa Andromache, wife of Prince Hector and the mother to Troy's future heir. That day when Odysseus's arrows rained fire, it was Andromache and her allies who saved Troy from destruction. I know because I was there. From my hiding place upon the Trojan plain, I saw everything.

Even if nobody saw me.

A low groan rises from my right, where a swaying Achaean relieves himself against a nearby hut. A short sword glints in the war belt at his waist. I myself carry no weapons but the small blade strapped to my thigh. Despite Andromache's best efforts to teach me, I am no warrior. Nor am I a leader whom others would follow as they do her and Prince Hector. Instead, my talents lie here, in the shadows, where I gather bits of information like straw and bring them back to those who might do something with them. Only, lately there is no straw to be found.

I approach Odysseus's settlement. The walls have been built high enough to block out prying eyes. There is only the sound of cracking wood, smelting metal at all hours, and a subtle shift in the air. One that tells me that Odysseus's men are building something behind those gates.

Whatever it is, it can only mean trouble for Troy.

It is the conviction that brings me back here, night after night.

The smell of livestock grows stronger the closer I draw to Odysseus's settlement. A few men stripped down to kilts work just outside the well-constructed gates. Most of the Achaeans deride Odysseus behind his back for these extra precautions he has taken. And why wouldn't they? Since the fighting resumed on the summer moon, the gridlock on the plain remains unbroken. Men bleed and men die, but the lines that mark the spaces between them do not move. Without Achilles and his deadly Myrmidons to bolster their ranks, the Achaeans have made no ground. But neither has Prince Hector and his army.

In the common places where the men gather after long days on the plain, words have taken the place of spears. The men mock Hector for the same reason they do Odysseus. Because they do not glimpse the higher stars that guide them, each along his own path. Hector's refusal to press is born not of weakness but of duty to a king, a council, and a hundred years of tradition that bind his hands. As for Odysseus . . .

Unlike the other warriors on Sigeum Ridge-men who drink and quarrel to drown their homesickness and their fatigue-Odysseus knows that danger is much closer than they realize.…