Under the Red Moon by Rowan Ashling

The story

Princess Talia Navarette has spent years watching her father sign away other people’s lives.

When the war reaches the Citadel’s walls, she uses the siege as cover to slip out of the city in disguise, with a small escort and a plan nobody at court knows about. She gets as far as the mountain roads before a band of outlaws takes her convoy.

Angelo Martinez is one of those outlaws, a swordsman who would always rather talk than fight. His crew steal from the rich to keep the hill villages fed, and in four years he’s never had a reason to question them. He’s never had a prisoner like her either.

When the crew work out who she is, Angelo has to decide whose side he’s on, and he doesn’t have long to do it. What follows is a run across an island at war, with no money and nowhere safe to stop. She doesn’t trust a man who jokes about everything. He doesn’t trust anyone born in a palace. Neither of them expected that to be the easy part.

Reward

for word of

A man in a big hat

and

a girl on a red mare with one white sock

Red Moon

Red Moon is an island, but a big one. Most people born there will never see the far coast, and the great lakes in the middle are wide enough that you can’t see across them. The land is split between four nations, each named after its capital city.

There’s copper all over the island, but the richest seams are in the hills where the four borders meet, and those borders have been argued over for centuries. Each nation mints its own coin in copper, silver and gold.

For a long time the four mostly kept to themselves. That changed when Ateven, a kingdom across the sea, declared itself an empire and started annexing the land around it. Every nation on Red Moon wanted to be stronger before Ateven came looking at them, and that meant copper. What started as skirmishes over the border hills has become open war.

The Citadel

The Citadel is the oldest nation on Red Moon and the strongest militarily. It’s a kingdom, and its capital is a fortress city that was standing long before its neighbours existed. In all that time its walls have never been breached.

Most of the island’s grain is grown in the Citadel’s farmland, and its river towns have mills and forges that have been working for centuries. It has more people than any other nation, and it keeps the largest standing army on the island.

New Twilight

A century ago New Twilight was a port town at the mouth of a river. Then the foundries came, the canals were dug to bring coal and iron in from the north, and the town kept growing until it became the biggest city on Red Moon. It now covers thirty-two districts, from the docks and factories along the water to the townhouses on the hills, and it’s still spreading.

There’s no king. The city is run by its great families, who made their money in shipping, iron and industry. They live in the Everheart Estates, a walled district in the middle of the city that nobody else can enter, and the most powerful of them are the Everhearts themselves. New Twilight’s engineers have made breakthroughs no one else in the world has matched, and since the war began, most of their work has gone to the army.

Cold Harbour

Cold Harbour is on the northern coast, on the far side of the mountains. Winters there are long and the sea ices over along most of the coast, but the bay at Cold Harbour stays open all year round, so it has always been the north’s port.

The mountains behind the city are full of coal, and Cold Harbour sells it to the rest of the island, along with iron, timber and ships. Very little grows that far north, so it buys its grain from the south, and now that the south is at war, it sells to both sides. There’s no crown. The city is run by its merchant companies, who also hire out mercenaries to whoever can pay. It’s the last place on Red Moon where people are still bought and sold.

Atlas

Atlas is on the south coast, built up the side of a mountain that runs down into the sea. The city rises in terraces from the harbour, white and pale stone houses with red and orange tiled roofs, joined by stairs and narrow lanes rather than streets. Summers are long, hot and dry, and the hills behind the city are covered in olive groves, lemon trees and vineyards.

Atlas has the best shipbuilders on Red Moon and the strongest fleet, and it trades further overseas than anyone else, which is how it heard about Ateven before the rest of the island did. Its army is small and built for defence. The city has never been taken, from the land or the sea, and Atlas would rather keep it that way than go looking for a fight.

For readers

Heat level: Closed door. Book one has no on-page sex.
Content: War, violence, death, grief, gore, references to suicide, and strong language.
Series: Book one of The Copper Crown. Book two is planned for 2028.
Release: Coming in 2027, as an ebook first, with a paperback to follow.

Mailing list

Rowan Ashling

Rowan Ashling writes romantasy from Ireland. Before the books there were years of running D&D campaigns, which is where most of these stories started. Under the Red Moon is Rowan’s first novel.

Rowan Ashling is named for two old Irish things: the tree you plant by the door to keep the bad luck out, and the vision of love that keeps you up at night.