A Woman of the Sword is an epic fantasy seen through the eyes of an ordinary woman. Lidae is a daughter, a wife, a mother — and a great warrior born to fight. This latest book by Anna Smith Spark, author of the acclaimed Empires of Dust series, delves deep into the complex relationship between warfare, gender and motherhood. In this pulse-racing extract, Lidae protects her family from a frightening home invasion.

A Woman of the Sword
By Anna Smith Spark
Published by Luna Press Publishing

And Lidae was dreaming of a city falling the next night, when it came. The red fires, but in the dream they’re not fires but walls of red, columns of red coming down all over the city crushing things. And then they’re people or huge trees, it’s her own city, Raena, in the country of Cen Elora that is certainly not at the edge of the world and is certainly not a desert, and it’s a city she’s dreamed about before, since she was a child, or the idea that she’s dreamed it before is part of the dream. And sometimes she’s sacking the city and sometimes she’s a victim of the sack and the army attacking her don’t look like people, but she can’t see what they look like.  

And she woke, confused, and it came.  

From off in the distance, very far off, a dog barked. A sharp angry warning. A noise, outside the house, the click of metal on something. The cow in the byre moved suddenly, a thud of its body, and it lowed. It was afraid for its calf.  

Something is wrong, Lidae thought. Something—A memory out of the dream, the dark in their camp one night, out on the flank in the mountains ahead of the rest of the army, too much silence, a sound of metal catching, very distant, enemy swords coming suddenly down on them out of the dark, they couldn’t see, they died, and they couldn’t see. Maerc had died that night, the wound had been in his back, he had been sleeping.  

The same silence. The same feeling.  

Wake the boys get them up get them up.  

‘I hope he was dreaming of good things, a woman, something,’ Acol had said of Maerc, and Acol had been weeping. They burned Maerc’s body as if he’d died gloriously in battle. It had broken Acol’s heart to think of Maerc dead without knowing, sweaty and foetid.  

Get the boys up. Get away. Something terrible is coming. I cannot bear to think of them dying in their sleep. A sound of metal. The cow in the byer lowed and stamped. Something terrible is here now. I feel it. 

Thieves, she thought. Thieves. 

‘Ryn. Samei.’ She clamped her hands over their mouths, tried to wake them but keep them silent, the terror in their faces at her hands over them, her face pressed down to them. Lidae thought: they think I am killing them.  

‘Ryn. Samei. Keep silent. Get down under the bed.’ She’d have thought it was Samei who’d have shouted, refused, flailed about. So young, too little to understand anything, but the fear in her voice made him dumb, he did as she ordered him mutely, too frightened of his mother’s voice and her hands that he must think were trying to kill him. Ryn, older, understanding things were wrong, trying to fight her off, ask questions, protest that he had been sleeping. Noise: him pushing her away, speaking.  

‘Ryn! Samei! Get under the bed! Get under the bed!’ 

She opened the chest, there was no time to put on the helmet, she stood in her nightshift and drew her sword.  

The blade gleamed in the dark. Hunger stirred and flickered in the metal. Bronze, the colour of the boys’ skin. Polished rich bronze, burning.  

In the hilt of the sword there was a red stone. Red glass. In the dark the red seemed to gleam. Ryn cried out. The sword felt so good in her hands. Samei whimpered like a beast. She thought: he thinks I will kill him.  

She shifted her grip on the sword hilt. Stood still one pace back from the doorcurtain that divided the sleeping place off from the living place. All the last years falling away. She felt the sword whispering. Light seemed to run in rainbows up the blade. She could remember very clearly the first time she had used a sword to kill someone.  

The sound of someone fumbling with the door, trying to shove it open. A voice said, ‘It’ll be barred. Just burn it.’ 

‘Stay there,’ she hissed to the children. ‘Just stay there, don’t move. Stay.’ 

The village was too far for help to come. A hill between the house and the village, Emmas had wanted that, because he’d wanted to be apart in silence, after years piled together in the army four to a tent. The dog barked again, furious. She thought: if there is anyone left alive in the village to come. She thought: but that’s madness. This is thieves prowling around.  

‘Stay and be utterly silent. Ryn, keep Samei silent. You must.’ 

The dog barked, far off, and then the barking stopped.  

‘He said there was coin here. A widow, he said, with gold hoarded away.’ The door was kicked open. They were going to burn us alive in here, Lidae thought. Cold night air through the door, making the doorcurtain tremble. Footsteps coming inside. On the other side of the wall the cow lowed suddenly and loudly and frantically. Cattle thieves. See? See? 

The doorcurtain was ripped aside and a man stood before her, staring at her through a helmet. Dead cold blank eyes, the cold set of his teeth. The sword in his hand trembled. It knew, the bronze sword that he carried, it knew what she was. Lidae’s sword came up took him. His throat, just at the point where the collarbones almost meet together, the red glass in the hilt of her sword smiling at her as the sword went in. The site of the soul, she had heard it said of that place in the throat. He made a noise as the sword took him. She had forgotten the sound of a man dying like this. The sword leapt and her heart leapt. 

A Woman of the Sword by Anna Smith Spark is published by Luna Press Publishing, priced £13.99.