The daeril looked with befuddlement at the stump of his mace. The head thumped to the floor of the cart. The daeril’s corpse followed a moment later.

Weallix tried to leap from the cart, but fell to his knees as the vehicle shook. As he rose, he found the blade at his neck.

“Call them off,” the stranger said in a soft voice.

“Daerils!” Weallix cried. “Release the people and stand back! Stand back!”

The stranger’s hood had fallen behind, revealing a silvery helm that covered his entire face. He waited as the monsters retreated to the edge of the clustered townsfolk. Then he raised his blade-dripping with blood from the monsters he’d slain-and pointed toward the mouthlike opening into the town. “Out. Never return.”

Weallix obeyed in a scramble, falling to the ground as he climbed from the cart, then dashed at a full run out of the cavern, his daerils falling in around him.

The cavern fell silent. The stranger finally reached up and peeled his helm from his head, exposing sweaty, brown-blonde hair and a youthful face.

Siris. The Sacrifice. The man who had been sent to die.

“I have returned,” he told the townspeople.

Chapter One

“He wasn’t supposed to win,” Master Renn hissed.

Siris could hear them talking in the other room of Renn’s hut. Siris sat quietly, holding a small bowl of soup in one hand. Fenweed, a very healthy soup. A warrior’s soup.

It tasted like dishwater.

“Well,” Master Shanna said, “we can’t exactly blame him, can we? For living, I mean?”

“He went to fight the God King,” Master Hobb said. “We sent him to fight the God King.”

And Siris had gone, just as his father and his grandfather had gone. Dozens had been sent over the centuries, always from the same family. A family sheltered, protected, and hidden by the people of the land.