Spotlight & Giveaway: The Promised Queen by Jeffe Kennedy

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Jeffe Kennedy’s new release: The Promised Queen

In The Promised Queen, the thrilling finale to Jeffe Kennedy’s Forgotten Empires trilogy, the fate of the world hangs in the balance as Con, Lia, and their allies sacrifice everything in a final bid to destroy the corrupt empire.

 
Claim the hand that wears the ring, and the empire falls.

Conrí, former Crown Prince of Oriel, claimed the hand that wears the Abiding Ring, but the prophecy remains unfulfilled. Queen Euthalia of Calanthe returned to her island kingdom, but broken in mind and body. With the blood of war unleashing ancient terrors, Calanthe isn’t the haven it once was.

Lia must use her magical bond with Calanthe to save their people while Con fights to hold off the vengeful Emperor Anure and his wizards. Con and Lia will have to trust in each other—and in love—to fend off ultimate disaster.

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from The Promised Queen 

From The Promised Queen by Jeffe Kennedy. Copyright © 2021 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Chapter Two
Lia at last agreed to let me carry her into the palace, conceding only because no one was awake to witness her weakness. Not that she had much of a choice about it. The woman might possess the courage and will—and the obstinate pride—of a person ten times her size, but her ordeal had weakened her to the point that she couldn’t stand without me holding her up. I hadn’t gone twenty steps carrying her before she’d slipped back into sleep. Or unconsciousness. A fine line there, but the flesh only responds to will so far as physical laws of the universe allow.
Though if anyone could bend those laws, Lia could.
Ibolya, wearing a cloak like Lia’s that hid all vestiges of the woman beneath, led us up to the palace via a path that was little more than a deer trail through the woods. The storm had escalated again. Lightning snaked through the sky, rattling us with sudden, intense cracks of nearby strikes, thunder shaking my bones. At least the canopy of broad, tropical leaves blocked most of the rain and tearing wind. Orchids danced in the waving limbs, trailing lush and luminous in the shadows. Vesno, at first delighted to be freed from the small cabin we’d stuck him in to keep the wolfhound from being swept overboard by the storm, whined at every boom and huddled so close to my leg I kept nearly tripping on him.
Runoff streamed down the trail from above, making the sometimes steep path treacherously slick. Rain lashed in a downpour through breaks in the canopy, startlingly chill. Still, I’d tromped through worse, with heavier loads. Lia weighed basically nothing—something I tried not to worry about.
I had zero experience with the dead coming back to life. I had no idea how to cope with this fresh terror that she might die all over again. Could I survive Lia’s death twice? I doubted it.
And then Rhéiane . . . I’d thought my long-lost sister dead, too. I’d lived all these years with that grief, had hardened myself to that reality along with everything else that lay in dust at the bottom of my burnt-coal heart. If Agatha’s “Lady Rhéiane” at Yekpehr was truly my sister, she’d have been Anure’s prisoner and probably his plaything all these years. If she was really alive, that meant what she’d endured . . . I shook that thought away.
I hope she’s dead, because the alternative doesn’t bear contemplating, Sondra had said. I didn’t know what I wanted, but “hope” didn’t enter into it.
When I’d thought Lia dead, yeah, there had been a restfulness to that loss of all hope. I shifted her in my arms so I could better see her face, so pale, luminous as her orchids in the thrashing trees. Her petal-thin skin had sunk over the hollows of her fragile skull, and shadows pooled there, giving her the uncanny aspect of a skull. She lay so still, lax and limp as death. Was she even breathing? I lowered my head to check, wary lest she bite at me again.
Relieved to feel her breath, I studied her parted lips. Had she truly been drinking my blood? The intensity of her animal reaction had taken me by surprise. It had been like wrestling a spitting cat, all claws and fury. Those teeth she hid behind close-lipped smiles—they were sharp as any predator’s. A force of nature, Ambrose had once called her.
No, surely that attack had been a fluke. Wounded soldiers woke like that sometimes—like part of their brain thought they should still be fighting whatever took them down. It had to be that. Better to settle on that explanation than suffer this grinding worry that Lia had lost too much of herself. That she’d come back as something other than who she’d been.
Because if she had . . . what then?
“It’s not easy to know what to wish for,” Ambrose commented, walking beside me with apparent ease despite the rough going and his withered leg, seeming not to notice the raging storm. He used his tall staff as an aid, digging it into the mud and rocks, but also moving without any visible limp. I’d pretty much given up on wondering about it. “Thus the traditional caution,” he added cheerfully.
“What’s that?” I asked, though I was too wrung out to care. When Ambrose wanted to tell you something, he couldn’t be shaken from it.
“Be careful what you wish for,” he said, as if every schoolchild knew that one.
I pondered that for as long as my exhausted brain and battered heart would allow—which was about five steps—then shook my head. “Seems to me it’s better not to wish for anything at all.”
“A reasonable conclusion on the face of it, but a false correlation when you examine it more deeply. Not to mention cowardly.”
“Conrí is no coward,” Sondra called from behind us.
Ambrose glanced back at her and winced as if in pain.
“Lady Sondra—I must caution you about using your new acquisition as a walking stick in that manner. The results could be most unpleasant.”
“You use yours like this,” she replied stubbornly.
“Yes, but I understand that mine is more than a simple staff and I know how to use it. Whatever you do, just don’t drop it.”
“Huh.” From her tone—and knowing Sondra—that information had only whetted her interest in the knobbed cane she’d grabbed as a makeshift weapon from the wizards’ horrific dungeon where we’d found Lia’s corpse. “Anyway, I must caution you about calling Conrí a coward when he risked his life infiltrating Yekpehr to rescue us. While you were noticeably absent, I might add.”
Ibolya halted abruptly enough that I nearly ran into her. Tipping her cowl back, she gave us all a strained smile. “Conrí, my lords and ladies, I must ask for silence if we wish to enter the palace unremarked.”
“No one can fail to observe Conrí,” Sondra pointed out. “One look and they’ll know who he is, and from there it won’t be hard to figure out who he’s carrying, even if they believed Her Highness was sequestered in some temple.”
“I can get us in unobserved,” Ibolya explained patiently, “but only if you’re silent. At least quieter than the storm.”
“You all heard her,” I told them. “Everyone be quiet, even the wizard.” Especially the wizard, I thought wryly to myself.

Giveaway: ONE paperback copy of THE PROMISED QUEEN (US only)

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Meet the Author:

Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning, best-selling author who writes fantasy with romantic elements and contemporary romance. She serves on the Board of Directors for Science Fiction Writers of Aamerica as a Director at Large.

Her recent works include the high fantasy trilogy The Chronicles of Dasnaria, in the same world as her award-winning fantasy series The Twelve Kingdoms and The Uncharted Realms. She is a hybrid author, and also self-publishes a romantic fantasy series, Sorcerous Moons. Her books have won the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2015 and won Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award in 2017. The Dragons of Summer, a novella in The Uncharted Realms series, was also a RITA finalist in 2019.

She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine.

Jeffe can be found online at her website, every Sunday at the SFF Seven blog, on Facebook, on Goodreads and on Twitter.

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