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Overview: Michelle West is the author of three interconnected series: The Sacred Hunt duology, the six-volumeSun Sword series, and The House War novels. She has published numerous short stories, as well as fantasty novels, under her maiden name, Michelle Sagara. She was a two-time nominee for the Campbell Award. She works part-time at BAKKA Books, one of Toronto’s larger bookstores, and writes a column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
#1. The Hidden City
Rath is not a family man. The son of Handernesse, an old and honored line, he has disavowed all blood ties, disappearing into the hundred holdings which the nobility barely acknowledge.
Jewel Markess is also without family—but not through choice. Orphaned at ten years of age, she’s learned the hard way that honesty doesn’t put food in her stomach or a roof over her head. She needs to eat if she’s going to survive, and in desperation, she chooses to steal a well-off man’s satchel.
Rath’s been around. He can spot the girl a mile off. He’s seen a hundred like her. He doesn’t expect her to succeed—but she does. What Rath doesn’t know is that this starving urchin is seerborn.
What neither know is that without her peculiar and intermittent vision, the city—and the Empire it guides—will fall to the ancient forces that are even now gathering beneath her streets.
#2. City Of Night
In the poorest of the Hundred Holdings, men and women are disappearing. The Magisterial Guards, overworked, underpaid, and short-staffed, don’t seem to care—and why would they? This is where the dregs of the city reside.
It is also where Jewel and her den now make their home. In the years since she gathered her den, they’ve fended off starvation and homelessness by grace of their foraging in the Hidden City.
They believe that nothing lives in the depths of the Hidden City’s endless night.
They’re wrong, but they don’t know how wrong.
Rath does. The future of the Empire may be in the hands of Ararath of Handernesse, the lone man with access to Jewel’s talent and the archives of the Order of Knowledge. Against demons and ancient magics, he is only one man.
One very determined, very angry man.
#3. House Name
Once, when the gods walked the world, their wars shattered—and remade—continents. Dragons flew, and the Wild Hunt roamed the open roads. Those with power survived; those without did not.
A city of beauty, grandeur and death rose on the Eastern shores, and the Lord of Night ruled from it. When the god fell, so did the city, and in time, other cities rose to take its place, the history of the gods forgotten in the long sundering.
The god has not forgotten his ancient home.
Jewel Markess and her den have survived demons in the streets of the Hundred Holdings. They’ve found temporary sanctuary in House Terafin, the most powerful of The Ten. But nothing in life is free; Jewel knows that to keep the safety and shelter her den’s been given, she has to earn her place in Terafin.
She’s lost kin. She’s determined not to lose anyone else. What the Terafin wants is information about the undercity. Given the years she’s spent foraging in its darkness, that should be easy.
It’s not. Every familiar entrance to the undercity is gone. Were it not for the irrefutable presence of demons, Jewel’s claims about this hidden city would be dismissed out of hand.
But the city needs to believe in the tales of a den of orphans, and it needs to believe quickly – or a god will once again walk the world.
#4. Skirmish
The Terafin lies dead.
No head of a House expects to die peacefully in bed. But the Terafin’s death was at the hands of a demon, in the presence of the Twin Kings, the magi, and the House Council. The Terafin’s assassination is therefore of concern to the whole of the Empire.
House Terafin is without a ruler for the first time since Jewel Markess crossed its threshold. No one intends that it should remain that way, and four members of the House Council have been planning their own ascendance for months—or years.
But the Terafin chose her heir. Jewel Markess swore, in secret, that she would take and hold the House upon the Terafin’s death; it was the only condition upon which the Terafin would allow her to head to the South in the wake of the Kings’ armies.
Summoned home—at great cost—Jewel has left the war in the Dominion, with its multiple armies and demonic enemies, behind. But she now faces a house divided, and a far more personal war.
The battlefield is House Terafin itself.
The stakes are everything she has ever loved.
#5. Battle
The weeks since Jewel Markess ATerafin has been acclaimed ruler of her House have not been peaceful; four assassination attempts have been made on her life, and one of the most important members of her House Council has been forced to retire, leaving a seat empty at a time when she requires trusted allies.
The war in the distant South has ended; the armies, victorious, have returned to Averalaan. During the victory parade of the Kings’ armies, the fifth assassination attempt occurs–in full view of the Ten, the Kings, and thousands of spectators. To survive, Jewel takes the sky on the back of a winged cat; she returns to the Terafin Manse, leaving demonic destruction in her wake, the demon itself in pursuit. In the forest behind her manse, she has the power–barely–to stand against the demon; she does not have the power to destroy it.
In the aftermath of the Terafin’s funeral, the Kings have demanded an audience with the newest ruler of House Terafin. A single, careless command given to the elemental earth on the day of the funeral has caused unexplained and disturbing architectural changes to the palace itself. But before Jewel can answer the summons, she falls prey to the strange, sleeping plague that has felled citizens across the city of Averalaan–from the poorest of holdings to the wealthiest of mansions across the Isle.
It is there–in the uneasy land of dreams–that Jewel discovers the reason for the sickness, and there that she begins to understand the forces arrayed against both her House and the Empire; if she can survive the traps set by the Warden of Dreams and by her deadly, erstwhile allies, she will wake to a changed world–if she wakes at all.
#6. Oracle
Beneath the streets of Averalaan, capital city of the Essalieyan Empire, lie the three Princes of the firstborn, doomed to sleep until the end of days. When gods walked the world, they feared the Sleepers. They fear them even now. If the Sleepers wake, the city will not survive—and the Sleepers are waking.
House Terafin has already felt the consequences of their stirring.
To save the city—and the House over which she rules—Jewel Markess ATerafin must go to face the Oracle. She leaves a House that is still divided, and a city in which demons, in human guise, have begun to move. At no time in Terafin’s history has it faced the dangers it now faces, and it will face them bereft of its leader.
Jewel has always seen unpredictable glimpses of the future—images of death and destruction which she cannot control and cannot always understand. To master her birthright, she chooses to walk the path of the Oracle. In her hands, she carries the only hope of the Winter Queen.
But the path she must travel was old when the gods ceased to walk the world. Ancient creatures stalk winter skies at the behest of the demons, who mean to ensure that she will never reach the Oracle’s side.
Secrets, long hidden from all but the firstborn, will finally be brought to light. Choices will be made, and paths chosen, from which there will be no return….
#7. Firstborn
Jewel ATerafin has never wanted to be a power. What she truly wants, she built in the streets of the poorer holdings. To protect what she built, to protect what she values above all else, she has accepted that power is necessary.
But with power comes responsibility.
Jewel has forced herself to do what would have once been unthinkable: She has surrendered her den-kin, Carver, to the wilderness, because she must if she is to have any hope of saving the rest of her family, and the city in which they dwell.
But she cannot leave him with nothing. Into his hands, she has placed the single, blue leaf that came from the wilderness and the dreaming combined. She doesn’t know what it does or what it was meant to do—but it is the most powerful item on her person, and it is the only thing she can leave him.
That leaf, however, was created to serve a purpose that Jewel does not understand. Nor does Carver, who now possesses it. With Ellerson by his side, Carver intends to traverse the wild Winter in an attempt to reach home—and the people who are waiting for him.
There are those who do understand the significance of Carver’s gift, and the disaster that will prevail if it remains in his hands. But time is of the essence. These lands are not unclaimed, and the Lord of these lands is waking from his ancient slumber.
Nor is the Lord the only threat. Firstborn, demons, and wild elementals are swirling around two mortal men in a storm that threatens to end the only chance the city of Averalaan has of surviving what is to follow.
#8. War
The eighth and final book in the epic fantasy House War series closes this chapter in a beloved world of magic and political intrigue, where new threats are stirring.
When the Sleepers wake.
Once, that phrase meant: never. The Sleepers were a myth, part of a story told to children. But in truth, the Sleepers, ancient princes in the court of the Winter Queen, were imprisoned in slumber by the gods themselves—in the cold, dark ruins of the ancient city that lies buried beneath the capitol of the Empire. And that prison is fraying, at last.
They are waking.
The gods no longer walk the world. There is no power that can stand against the princes when they wake—and the city that has been Jewel’s home for her entire life will be destroyed when the Sleepers walk. There is only one person to whom they owe allegiance, only one chance to halt them before they destroy everything in their ancient rage.
But that person is the Winter Queen; she is not, and has never been mortal. Jewel carries the last of the surviving saplings that might usher in a new Summer age—but all of the roads that lead to the court of the Queen are closed.
Jewel ATerafin has faced the Oracle’s test. She has control of the prophetic powers that she once considered a curse and a burden. She will find her way to the Winter Queen, and she will ask—or beg—the Winter Queen to intervene to save her kind, her House, and everything she loves.
But she is mortal, and time has never been her friend. The demons are waiting to bar her way, bringing battle to the hidden ancient paths on which she must travel. To win, she must face the true meaning of the Oracle’s test, and risk sanity and life to make the choice that has always lurked at the heart of the firstborn’s test.
And even then, it might be too late.
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