The cries—the cheers—grew more coordinated, and Ataelus showed his distaste for the noise, turning a curvet and nipping at Tom’s horse.

Bad Tom looked back at Ser Gavin. By him, Ser Alcaeus was smug. The Morean grinned.

“They’re shouting ‘Ave, Imperator,’” Ser Alcaeus said with intense satisfaction.

extras

meet the author

MILES CAMERON is a full-time writer who lives in Canada with his family. He also writes historical fiction under another name. The Traitor Son Cycle series is his fantasy debut.

introducing

If you enjoyed

THE DREAD WYRM

look out for

SNAKEWOOD

by Adrian Selby

Once they were a band of mercenaries who shook the pillars of the world through cunning, alchemical brews, and cold steel. Whoever met their price won.

Now, their glory days behind them, scattered to the wind, and their genius leader in hiding, they are being hunted down and eliminated one by one.

A lifetime of enemies has its own price.

Introductory Notes by Scholar Goran

I never knew my father. Not until the end.

It was my patron that brought him home to our tribe, mortally wounded and ready to die.

All of what follows is for him, Gant, and his last wish that a record be kept of what became of the greatest mercenary crew ever to take a purse. Kailen’s Twenty.

The stories of them in their prime are few and far between all these winters later. I spent almost a year tracking down those who fought with or against them, but their downfall is, for me, the most compelling and tragic story, one I’ve been given the mandate to record by my patron, out of respect for his beloved wife, my father and all those who were killed by him failing them. I have put all these documents together in a way that I hope makes sense of the fate of the Twenty in these last few years and also includes accounts of them in their prime, when, arguably, they saved the Old Kingdoms at Tharos Falls, when twenty-one men held the line and the line could not be crossed.

To tell this story I was given also the letters of the princess who has now returned to her throne, as well as those of the man whose loyalty to her was the beginning of the end for the Twenty. The man betrayed at Snakewood.

In the moments of his dying, my father asked us a simple question, and from the papers that follow, it is clear he did not ask the question of himself.

“Who ever got what they deserved?”

CHAPTER 1

Gant

My name’s Gant and I’m sorry for my poor writing. I was a mercenary soldier who never took to it till Kailen taught us. It’s for him and all the boys that I wanted to put this down, a telling of what became of Kailen’s Twenty.