EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy Read Free

She wouldn’t stop until he was dead. Her determination was in her eyes. Everyone knew: Sara Fairchild tolerated no one’s belittlement of her family.
    He said reluctantly, “I said ‘Your father is a disgrace to this empire. Be glad his blood soaks the land.’”
    “Yes, that was it,” Sara said softly, “As a father yourself, you should know this, Simon Codfield—there is no greater love than a daughter bears for her father.”
    Before he could move or protest, she threw the dagger that was attached to her thigh and it pierced his throat. He fell to the ground like all of his friends. She walked up to stare down at his body. Sara tilted her head to the side as she noticed that she’d been off by a millimeter. The dagger hadn’t pierced his jugular. As the blood seeped from the wound to pool beneath his head, she knew he’d be dead within a minute. He couldn’t speak with the wound to his throat. As his fingers twitched with the death throes of a man who could barely move, she shrugged and picked up the scimitar at her feet. After wiping it down, she wrestled the scimitar’s carrier off the dead woman’s back. Hefting it carefully, she swung the sheathed scimitar along her back.  
    By that time, Simon Codfield was dead, and she retrieved her dagger from his throat, careful to wipe the blade down on his tunic before putting it back at her thigh.
    Without breaking a sweat, she had taken them all on and won.  
    As she sprinted down the alley with her newly acquired scimitar in hand, her well-trained ears caught the groan of the lone thief still left alive in the alley. The muscle man would live to tell the tale of Sara Fairchild another day.

Chapter II

    S ARA HAD ONE THING ON her mind while she ran through the streets of Sandrin: getting home quickly. She desperately hoped that the telltale sign of blood wasn’t on her clothes. She’d done her best to avoid blood splatter, always killing cleanly and from a distance, if possible. But blood had the strangest ways of falling. It could splatter, it could spray, or it could shoot out. You never knew which way the blood would flow until the second before you killed a person. Sometimes not even then. She’d grown used to blood ever since her father had taken her to her first executioner’s gallows. She had been twelve. They had executed a man, convicted of raping a child, by guillotine. The fierce joy of the crowd had been unsettling for a still young Sara. But her father had spoken to her long and hard after the crowd had dispersed. He had explained the man’s crime. Had explained that the child the executed man had hurt had suffered for a long time and then died at his hands.  
    “That was why the crowd gloried in his death as a rightful passage. It righted the wrong he had done,” her father had said in his grave voice.  
    Sara had understood her father’s explanation. The death hadn’t bothered her as much as the crowd’s adulation. But even while she stood in her leather boots on the cobblestones stained red with the blood of past executions, it hadn’t been long before she became fascinated by the blood and the sport that went into the killing of one single man.
    As far as killings went, that one was tame. But it was the first time that she had seen a person killed alongside her father. The first time Sara had seen life’s blood flow from someone’s veins. The first time she’d seen a head separated from a body. But it wasn’t the last. Because fighting and blood was in her veins. She was a Fairchild, and, more importantly, she was the daughter of Vincent Fairchild, one of the empire’s premier commanders and the man responsible for the most wins in the imperial games for the last fifty years. Before her father had been a commander in the army, he had been a gladiator without peer. One whose tenacity in the ring, ability to defeat the fiercest foe, and calmness when faced with death had beguiled even the most jaded spectator.
    As Sara flew