Failures of Four Kingdoms Series

The Daughters of Izdihar meets The Foxglove King: An ex-soothsayer and stranded scholar of curses upend a utopian community that has no love for refugees.

Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells, scholar of curses and magical history, has spent several years on a research expedition abroad in Quruscan, one of the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia. When Radiant’s home country of Loasht suddenly revokes his citizenship—and that of his entire ethnic enclave—he soon finds that Quruscan is no longer a safe haven either.  He needs someone to help him escape: someone with the sheer cunning to escort him to safety. The perfect candidate is Kalyna Aljosanova: a crafty, mysterious mercenary with an uncanny reputation. 

But with the political situation in Loasht far more volatile and dangerous than when Radiant left it, he may never be able to return home to his family. Wielding her signature guile, Kalyna finds Radiant asylum in a utopian community on the border between Loasht and the Tetrarchia, and, for a moment, it seems like they might finally have a safe place to stay. But when the group’s charismatic leader grows wary of the refugees flocking over the border to his community—and suspicious of Kalyna in particular—a brief sense of safety begins to unravel. . . . 

Kalyna the Cutthroat deftly imagines how the pressures of heroism warps even the most unshakeable of survivors, asking what responsibilities humans have to one another, and whether one good deed—of any magnitude—can absolve you of your past. 

A fantastical game of political intrigue played by a fraud, where the grumpy snark of K. S. Villoso’s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro meets a rich Eastern European–inflected world akin to Ava Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman.

A plucky, sardonic con artist must “prophesize” her way out of peril— discovering along the way that the keys to power and politics are nothing more than the stories that we can sell as truth.

Kalyna’s family has the Gift: the ability to see the future. For generations, they traveled the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia selling their services as soothsayers. Every child of their family is born with this Gift—everyone except Kalyna.

So far, Kalyna has used informants and trickery to falsify prophecies for coin, scrounging together a living for her deteriorating father and cruel grandmother. But Kalyna’s reputation for prophecy precedes her, and poverty turns to danger when she is pressed into service by the spymaster to Rotfelsen.

Kalyna is to use her “Gift” to uncover threats against Rotfelsen’s king, her family held hostage to ensure her good behavior. But politics are devious; the king’s enemies abound, and Kalyna’s skills for investigation and deception are tested to the limit. Worse, the conspiracy she uncovers points to a larger threat, not only to Rotfelsen but to the Tetrarchia itself. 

Kalyna is determined to protect her family and newfound friends, but as she is drawn deeper into palace intrigue, she can no longer tell if her manipulations are helping prevent the Tetrarchia’s destruction—or if her lies will bring about its prophesized downfall.