Spirit in Motion

The occupation of Lebonath Jas is seven months old. The war against the flamen - the corrupt religious order that enslaved a planet for four centuries - is entering its final phase. The Thirteenth Dragonhorse, Ardenai Morning Star, is striving to bring order from chaos in a devastated world while navigating the colonization of the new world spinning above its sister. His governance is tested daily by fanaticism manufactured to serve an empire, by the death that never stops, and by an alien species whose pharmaceutical wealth was built on the suffering of an entire people.

Around him, his family holds. Military Governor Konik, silver-haired and politically brilliant, navigates the occupation with a knife fighter's precision and a grandfather's tenderness. Ardenai's adopted son Gideon, still learning what it means to have a father, faces the woman who sold him into slavery - and discovers that the wisdom to forgive is not the same as the inability to be hurt. His companion wife Ah'ren has become the very beating of his heart. And hidden below the city, in a world that has not heard music for four hundred years, a carillonneur has been repairing an ancient pipe organ in secret, waiting for a day worth playing.

Spirit in Motion is a novel about what it costs to govern well, and what it gives back. It is the fifth volume of The Dragonhorse Chronicles - and the one where everything the series has been building finally lands.