History remembers chess as a game of two colors. It used to have four.
Lord Kaelen Pique-Ashva is the Spade-Hold's sharpest spy, a knight who trusts logic over faith. His Raja sends him into the Heart-Ward, a red kingdom of priests and parade armor, with one job: find out whether its so-called heresy is a nuisance or the crack that brings the whole realm down.
Princess Lyra Coeur-Ratha has been told all her life that the old texts are superstition. She can still read the dead language they were written in, and the prophecy she finds there names the Heresy for what it is: a fourth kingdom the histories erased, one that never stopped playing.
With Lady Elara of the Diamond Dominion watching every move, Kaelen and Lyra are pulled into the same game from opposite sides. Assassins slip past the palace guard. Pawns turn on their masters. And under the High Temple waits the Ruby Requiem, a weapon built to end the last war, now stirring for the next one.
Told decades later by the man who lit the fuse, The Ruby Heresy opens The Chronicle of the Four-Color War, a fast-moving epic fantasy of spies, prophecy and court intrigue, and the story of how four kingdoms became two.