THE TENTH SON

Every sixty years, the demon lord Kazurath breeds ten sons. He raises them. He trains them. He turns them against each other. And then he eats the one who wins.

For fifty thousand years, the harvest has never failed. Eight thousand three hundred and thirty names are carved into the wall of his ritual chamber. Every one of them was his child.

Then an elf died giving birth to his tenth son, and hid a journal in the folds of a blanket.

Juro grows up in a fortress where love is livestock management and his own death is already scheduled. He is three years old when he finds his mother's research. Seven when he learns what the family is for. Ten when he meets his nine brothers, and begins deciding which of them he will have to become.

He has sixty years to solve a cycle that has eaten every clever son who ever tried.

But the plan has a flaw his father never bred for. The ninth son was supposed to be his rival.

He became his best friend.

And there is a word in his mother's language, the one nothing in the fortress had any use for. It's what you say when you're forgiven for something you haven't done yet.