Megiddo
History kept one roll of this war, carved on a temple wall at Karnak. A scribe's boy kept the other.
1457 BCE. The queen of Egypt is dead, every city from the desert to the great river of Naharin has risen against the young king she left behind, and three hundred kings are waiting for him at Megiddo. He marches north with an old man at his shoulder who has been saying his thoughts a breath before he thinks them, all his life.
Kha is fifteen, a scribe's boy carrying the army's day-roll and a second, secret roll that says why. When he's frightened, things move: a pen, a cup, a stone. The Seer of the Great House has seen it.
Ahat is seventeen, a weaver's daughter on the walls of Megiddo. She has seen the day the gate will shut with the kings outside it, and the women of the upper town letting their cloaks down the wall. Her mother laughed. Ahat stayed.
Below the ridge at Yehem, three roads cross the hills to Megiddo. Two are wide. The third runs through a gorge ten paces wide, horse behind horse and man behind man, and the king's officers beg him not to take it. History knows which road he chose. It never knew whose choice it was.
Between Kha and Ahat lie a cheerful runner sent to make friends with Kha and watch him, an old master who has sworn him to keep and never steer, a trader with blue-stained hands who knows too much, and seven months of siege on either side of a wall of green timber. There, a boy and a girl who share no tongue learn each other's words through a gap the width of a hand, while the city behind her starves.
Kha learns what a thing written down can do, and what it costs to put the truth in front of a king. Ahat learns what seeing is worth inside a starving city, and what it costs to look.
Megiddo is about growing up inside a war: a friendship whispered through a wall, a friend who was sent to be a spy, a line in a boy's handwriting that he never wrote, a choice nobody can be sure was the king's own, and the difference between steering a person and asking them.
Wickseers tells the secret history of Earth's gifted, from the world of Aftwend. Every book stands alone.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
