Kings and Shepherds

Princess Ikia Miriam Emet of Ha-or is raised on stories. Miriam's adoptive father King Emet, brother Prince Matthew, and the Hayori palace servants tell her, more times than she can count or even remember, about the King's largesse to palace thief Rachel-Miriam's mother who died when she was still a child. The royal residence in the city of Sekel also seems, to Miriam, the original home of all Ha-or's most ridiculous stories. The fables abound through its corridors and halls, orchards and courtyards. Whispers of her father's unnatural abilities of vision and knowledge as well as manifold thinly veiled treatises to live by the words of Ha-or's Books of the Law. Feeling strangled by the manifold rules and the storied weight of Emet's watchful eye, Miriam rebels against her father on her quest for freedom. Her crusade against his rule starts simply but quickly grows dangerous when she agrees to betray him to the Emperor of the neighboring kingdom. In this allegorical novel, Raelee May Carpenter takes readers to the new world of the Continent where loyalties are clearly polarized between the two kingdoms of Ha-or and Hennum. The truth, however, never seems transparent-especially to those who need it the most. As eternity collides over constantly contested borders, the real fate of both fable and kingly sovereignty is rumored to lie in something both simple and obscure......the end of a single life.