The First Pages

Prologue

The rod had a name once, before the desert swallowed it and the centuries forgot. Men had killed for it, and men had died holding it, and still it waited—buried beneath stone and silence, patient as the rock that cradled it.

In the year of our Lord 1604, a king sat upon an English throne and asked a question that would cost more lives than he could count. Not because the question was cruel, but because the answer was a weapon.

Chapter One — The Duke

Charles Hillcrest, Duke of Norfolk, had not prayed in three years. Not since the morning he found his wife cold beside their daughter’s empty crib, and the vicar told him it was God’s will. He had stood in the churchyard then, in the rain, and decided that if this was God’s will, then God could keep His silence, and the Duke would keep his.

So when the King’s summons came, sealed with the royal wax and carried by a man who would not meet his eyes, Hillcrest read it once, folded it, and set it beneath a candle. He watched the wax pool and the ink run, and still he did not pray.

“Your cousin requires you, Your Grace,” the messenger said from the door, as though the Duke had not just burned the proof.

“My cousin requires a great many things,” Hillcrest said. “Most of them, God provides. I am told He is generous that way.”

The messenger did not smile. He was young, and he believed in the things he carried.

Hillcrest would think of that boy often, in the months that followed. He would think of belief, and of what it costs a man to keep it—and what it costs the world when such a man lets it go.

Chapter Three — The Arena

Levi Mack had been thrown by better bulls and worse ones, and he had gotten back up every time. That was the deal his father had taught him, the only sermon Chance Mack ever gave: you get back up. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to be fast about it. But you get back up, because the alternative is staying down, and a Mack has never stayed down.

The dust rose in the arena light, gold as old money, and the crowd was already on its feet. Levi spat, tasted copper, and nodded. The gate clanked open, and the world became a roar and a twist of muscle and a single bright thought:

Eight seconds. Just eight seconds between you and the name you were born to carry.

He would remember that ride. Not because of the bull, or the score, or the buckle they handed him afterward. He would remember it because it was the last ride before the shaman found him, and the last time in his life that eight seconds was all that stood between a man and his ruin.