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  VALIANT BOOK ONE

  JOANNA WHITE

  Copyright © 2019, 2021 by Joanna White

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: [email protected].

  Second Edition, 2021 by Joanna White.

  Previously published by Ambassador International in 2019.

  Thanks to God, for giving me this talent and guiding me through this series. To my family for all their support, and especially my husband Michael, for being my editor, for pushing me, and for all your help with ideas. This series wouldn’t be where it is without all of you.

  Once you turn this page, you have no choice. You could be taken…you could be the next one to be thrown in Zagerah. Once you go in, chances are, you will never come out. If you’re lucky, you’ll win and have potential— potential to be a fighter, to become one of their assassins...one of the Hunters.

  Either way, your fate is not up to you. If you want to take the easy way out, fine, don’t turn the page. People need to know what’s really going on; people need to find a way to stop the Aretul from creating new Hunters.

  This is an impossible task. The Hunters are unstoppable. The only ones who can defeat them are, in fact, themselves. They’re all bonded… together. The only way you could win your freedom is to outsmart them. If you can.

  Godspeed.

  PART ONE:

  Hunter

  CHAPTER 1

  JARED

  The whip flashed once as it snapped out and lashed my target across the back.

  My lips slid up into a devious smile. It was hard enough to knock him down. I slipped the whip back in its place on my belt and looked back up. Novarch had his sword already unsheathed and was holding it against the man’s throat.

  The man glared up at us as he leaned on his arms for support on the dry, cracked earth. Sweat covered his body, along with thick patches of dirt and grime.

  “Your name,” Hindah, our second-in-command, demanded.

  “Gabriel,” the man hissed.

  “Age.” Hindah sneered down at the prisoner.

  “Twenty-four.” The man glared up at Hindah as he spoke. Hatred blazed from his dilated eyes.

  Hindah glanced at Novarch. “Jared,” he called.

  I was at his side in an instant.

  “You do it,” he said, smirking at some joke I didn’t get.

  Unsheathing my Inquiri blade, I sliced Gabriel’s throat without hesitation or regret.

  Killing was all I ever knew.

  ***

  A day earlier

  AVRELLA

  “Averella! I need the weeds plucked! If you don’t get it finished, then we’ll have nothing to eat,” my mother called.

  I sighed and rolled my eyes, but grudgingly walked outside and knelt beside our garden. It was larger than most of the ones in our village, which was why most of the people traded their items for vegetables from us. They would pay us with what we didn't have—wool for clothes and blankets.

  Without even saying a word, my brother Gabriel knelt on my left and began tugging on weeds.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Gabe, you know you shouldn’t be working.”

  He sighed and plucked a weed, throwing it behind him. “Just because I’m sick doesn’t mean I have to lie in bed all day.”

  “Yes, it does!” I hissed under my breath. If Mother heard… “Working is only going to make your condition worse.”

  “My condition?”

  I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “You know that’s not what I meant!”

  His eyes softened. “Yeah, I know.”

  It wasn’t often he became angry, and it was even less than that when he held a grudge. Even if someone said anything to offend him. Fortunately, he knew I hadn’t meant it, and more than that: he knew I was right.

  No one knew much about diseases or how they worked. When anyone became sick, you were just… sick. There was an older woman named Ganna in the village who knew a little about herbs, but that was mostly enough to cure coughing. Anything beyond that and…

  You died.

  “Where’s your mother?” It was our neighbor, Vanese. Her light brown hair was matted, and her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed.

  I gestured to the door. “Inside.”

  She nodded and shoved open the door.

  Gabriel and I exchanged a look. “Do you think this means that Matthex was taken?”

  He clenched his jaw but stood. As he did, his body collapsed, and his eyes fluttered. As his body twitched and jerked, I held him.

  It was all I could do when the fits happened.

  My greatest fear was that one day, I would hold him, and the fit would take his life. I constantly prayed to God that it wouldn’t happen, that He would protect my brother, but I had no way of knowing if He would answer my prayer. Or if He had a different plan in mind.

  Gabriel’s eyes rolled back in his head, so I just sat there quietly, hoping and praying.

  Later that night, Gabriel was lying in bed asleep. Mother and I knelt by the fire, silent as we tried to keep warm. Nights became cold—eerily cold. The howls and wails from Zagerah could be heard, and I shuddered to think of what horrors were inside the prison.

  “Did Matt get taken?” I glanced up from where I stirred the soup.

  Mother nodded. “Vanese is a wreck. After her husband was taken two years ago…”

  I swallowed. “She has no one.”

  Mother nodded, running a hand through her thick black hair.

  No one knew why the Aretul arrested villagers. They only ever took men and boys, for no reason and at seemingly random. Everyone feared it, but no one could explain it.

  Though I would never admit this to Mother, I often went to Ganna, the oldest woman in the village. We spoke for hours on end, about the Aretul, about the legends of Zagerah… About why we were oppressed and why they did this to us.

  Her husband had been taken twenty-five years ago. Nine years ago, her son had been taken.

  “Why? Why do they take them? They don’t even do anything wrong!” I shouted in frustration.

  Mother stared at me in horror, before she walked over and smacked my mouth. “Averella! Don’t say such things! If they heard you say that, they would kill you.”

  I glared at her, left the ladle in the pot, and stormed off to my room.

  That night my whole world came crashing down.

  The Gredi guards of the Aretul stormed inside, knocking things aside, leaving the room cluttered. One of them kicked over the bowl of soup Mother kept warm over the fire. The precious soup formed a puddle on the floor, which another Gredi stepped in.

  The Gredi rushed toward Gabriel’s room. I charged in that direction, reaching for a sword that had belonged to my father. Before I even had a chance to grab it, the Gredi had me pinned to the ground.

  Mother screamed, shoving at one bulky man from what I could see, but two more grabbed her arms. Four more tore the door to Gabe’s room off the hinges, dragging Gabriel through the house and out the door.

  Mother sobbed hysterically, especially as they dragged us outside to watch them take Gabriel away. I lunged at the men, thrashing and trying to fight them, but they held me back with grips of iron.

  Gabriel shook his head at me, wincing as they chained his hands to the creatures they use to drag prisoners to Zagerah. Even as he coughed, and struggled to stay on his feet, they left him there. Despite that his knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the ground, he still held my gaze. I realized what h
e was trying to tell me: don’t do it.

  “No! Please, don’t… don’t take him!” I screamed, violently thrashing against the two men that held me back.

  Gabe just met my gaze and smiled.

  Then they rode off, taking my brother with them.

  “Please, no!”

  CHAPTER 2

  AVERELLA

  My mother had been crying for hours. After the Gredi had left, she refused to come out of her room. Once the Gredi arrested someone, they were never seen again.

  I knew without even speaking to her that she’d given up all hope. We both had.

  My father had been dead for years, and Gabriel was always her first concern because of his sickness. Even I, being his younger sister, felt the urge to protect him from anything and anyone that threatened him. He never wanted to talk about his disease, and he always wanted to pretend that things went on as normal. Even with our lives oppressed under the Aretul, he wanted to pretend we didn’t live here in tiny villages, poor and starving, being kept weak so that resistance against the Aretul would be impossible. They were lab workers and engineers who controlled our world. In a way, they were the government that ruled us with an iron fist. Legends said that they were even the ones who created the mythological Hunters, but I had no idea if that was real or only legend. They were the ones who would send the Gredi after innocents, who would kidnap them and send them off to Zagerah.

  I had to go after him.

  Gabriel wouldn’t want me to, and it would tear my mother apart, but I had to. I knocked on Mother’s door one more time. If she opened, I wouldn’t do it. If she didn’t…That would be my answer. I knocked again.

  No answer.

  I went into my bedroom and picked up the small, handheld mirror Mother had given me when I was four and looked at my reflection staring back at me. Thick bags lined my eyes from not getting any sleep the previous night.

  Earlier, I had taken a small knife from the kitchen table. As I clutched it in my hands, I didn’t think about it; I couldn’t.

  From now on, my life would be about survival; just doing what I needed to do. I gripped the hilt so tightly that my knuckles turned white and with a sharp inhale, I sliced it across my waist-long hair. It took one slice, then two, and three until I completely lost count. Piece by piece, the sleek black hair fell to the ground in piles. Glancing at the mound of what had once been my hair, I expected my chest to ache, but it didn’t.

  My hair reached my shoulders now, but other than the jagged ends, it wasn’t too bad. Good or bad, I didn’t care; I just felt numb. Numb to everything except the thought of something terrible happening to Gabriel.

  The Aretul never experimented on females. They never sent the Hunters after women either. So, women were never taken.

  It had taken me half an hour to chop off all my hair. It was just long enough so that I was able to tie it back to get it off my shoulders. Next, I went into my brother’s room and grabbed some of his clothes. I wrapped a cloth tightly around my chest several times, until it looked flat, and then dressed in his clothes, which were a bit big on me. I put on a pair of his work boots and stuffed two rolled-up cloths to help them fit better.

  I took one last look at myself in the mirror. The young woman I remembered looking back at me earlier was gone. My waist-long, straight, black hair was mostly gone. A plain black short-sleeved shirt beneath a black leather jacket hid most of my figure. I had on black leather hunting gear pants. Most of the clothes around here for men consisted of rubber-armored leather pants, with basic shirts and jackets. The men were always working, either on the farms or in the mines, so they needed tough material to protect them.

  As much as it stung, I hoped that I looked more like a man and less like a woman. I wasn’t worried about how to be taken; that would be the easy part. Fortunately, when I grabbed the kitchen knife and hid it inside my right sleeve, it was small enough to be concealed perfectly. I took one of Father’s swords that was hidden underneath the wooden floor in the living room and stuck that inside the belt at my waist. Taking several more of Father’s daggers that he left Mother, I slipped those inside my boot. The cold metal bit my leg. They were going to find the sword, I knew. But it would be unusual for them to find me without one.

  I left a note for Mother, doubting she would find it for a while and left the house behind.

  ***

  Hours later, I was walking toward the Averell, the rock-formation that our world and I were named after. The rocks were all formed in a perfect circle, almost like chairs around a huge stone table.

  I smiled, remembering the old children’s story my father used to tell my brother and me when we were younger. “Long, long ago, when our world flourished and thrived in the Early Days, the people found another world, far away from our own, and saw that it was struggling. So, in compassion, our people gathered together at the Averell and decided what they could do to help. They took every other stone out of the Averell and traveled to the far away world and left the stones there. Our people provided a test in which the rightful king would be the only one to pull one of our Inquiri blades out of one of the stones. Because it was an Inquiri blade, only the true heir to the throne on that world would be able to pull it out. He would be one of their people with Hunter potential. We didn’t share with them the secret of the Hunters; we didn’t want to corrupt their world to the Aretul’s power like our own had been. Without knowledge of the Aretul and the Hunters, the Aretul couldn’t rise to power in that world.”

  “So, what happened to the people in the far away world, Father?” I had asked him, staring at him intensely. My tired eyes drooped, but I awaited the end to the bedtime story.

  “One of their great warriors, Arthur, had taken the Inquiri blade out of the stone. He became their king and helped restore the land and its people. But eventually, his people killed him, and the land was again engulfed in darkness. So, our ancestors, after helping them, had left, leaving the stones with the people on that world as a silent reminder through all the ages of the great encounter between the worlds.”

  As a little girl, I couldn’t understand why they came back. They had been safe on that world, away from the Aretul, so why had they returned at all? Gazing at the stones before me, with the stars twinkling overhead, the two moons circling one another, providing plenty of light to see, just for a second I imagined the old story was true. I could travel to that world, and be free, with Gabriel and Mother, safe. The minute I peeled my eyes away from the silver and blue light of the moons, I forced my thoughts to come back to reality.

  I looked up at Averell, on top of the hill. From there, someone could easily see where the missing stones would have been.

  Entering Averell alone wasn’t forbidden, but it wasn’t recommended. It was at the edge of the Borderline, where the boundary of Zagerah began. As I stepped in-between two of the rocks, I felt a little surge of power go through me. I knelt and leaned against a stone behind me, which left the stone table in front of me that formed the middle.

  Many long hours passed while I waited there, and, after a while, I started to drift off to sleep. It wouldn’t seem unusual to them that I was here, waiting, like easy prey. Most of our people came here to think or to mourn lost ones. The only odd thing was that I was alone; usually, everyone came in groups.

  The ground started shaking, harder than anything I’d ever felt before. It knocked me to the ground and the air left my lungs with a gasp. I propped myself up, but a strong wind started, so I stayed low to the ground, frozen in fear. The Gredi surrounded me, holding weird weapons I’d never seen before, all pointed at me. Four men darted toward me, two trying to grab my arms. Despite that I wanted them to arrest me, I wasn’t going to go easily. Before my father was killed, he had taught me to fight and protect myself, in case the Aretul ever changed their minds and decided to start taking women.

  I kicked one standing in front of me, hard in his knee. On my left, I grabbed the Gredi’s wrist and twisted it. The one on my right had star
ted to put his hand around my mouth and choke me, so I bit him. The one behind me lunged forward, heading right for me. I ducked out of range of whatever weapon he had and kicked out, trying to knock his feet out from under him.

  I took the weapon out of his hands and used it to club the first man, then came around from that swing to hit the second in the stomach, knocking his air out.

  “Enough!” a booming voice yelled.

  All the Gredi froze, staring in the direction the voice had spoken.

  “Grab him,” the voice commanded. Before I could do anything, the weapon was ripped out of my hands and my hands were yanked behind me, caught in a tight grasp.

  I tried not to grunt, out of fear that would give my voice away. To keep from screaming in pain, I bit the inside of my lip. My right wrist was twisted, but I wasn’t sure how badly. By the time I blinked, a man stood in front of me.

  His hair was long and dark brown, and it was tied back. His eyes were completely black, without a pupil. Some type of leather vest covered his chest, and he wore the typical hunting-gear pants most men wore. Tattoos started at his wrists and wound around his arms, past his elbows, and then disappeared inside his vest. The tattoos stuck out like veins, and the more I stared at them, they seemed to ripple and twist along his arms.

  “I am Hindah. You are arrested by the order of Aretul. You will be escorted to the prison of Zagerah by Gredi effective immediately. Fight back and you will be killed instantly, rather than given the privilege of roaming the prison grounds first. Take him,” he hissed at the Gredi. “And this time hold onto him.”

  He glared at the man on the ground, the first one I’d kicked. That Gredi started to stand, but all of the sudden, he collapsed back on the ground. I stared at the fresh wound on the Gredi’s chest. The man, Hindah, had taken out a sword, an Inquiri blade, and killed him, faster than my eyes could see.