The seat is his. The household is his. The men who buried him in the dark are still breathing, and now he has the reach to find them.

Algherand Dracumont took the Earlship at the end of a sword and the edge of a plan nobody saw coming. He holds the western seat, and the empire is only beginning to wonder what he means to do from it.

There is a princess of imperial blood, and a wedding he wants done before her family finds a way to stop it. There is a Fae bound to him. There is a noblewoman with a sharp tongue who has not made up her mind about him. And there are the men who swore to him when his word was all he had.

He had thought a title would settle things.

It has not.

Choices that used to cost him nothing cost him something now, and the bill goes up every month. To hold the western kingdoms, he has to win over lords who do not trust him, and break the ones who never will. To win his bride, he has to outplay an Empress who smiles only while she is counting. The men he hunts are powerful too, and they are not waiting around to be found. They killed the friend who tried to save him and put a nine-year-old boy in the dark cells and left him to be forgotten.

Dragon-blood sleeps in the body until violence wakes it. Suppression magic cages a man's power inside his own skin. A misplaced word at a noble feast can leave a corpse in the courtyard before dawn. Algherand will court, scheme, kill, and reach for a power his own teacher warned him never to touch.

Power does not make a man's choices easier. It makes them harder to justify. And the closer he gets to the men who sent him to prison, the less he looks like the boy who sat at his mother's bedside.

The Earl of Dracumont II is the second book in the Earl of Dracumont series. Epic fantasy with political intrigue, magic, and morally complex characters, and multiple relationships.