QK Agent Round - Kaza

Title: The Tsar's Heir
Nickname: Kaza
Word count: 110K
Genre: YA fantasy

Query:

The Willed shall rule the Unwilled. This is the first law of Kaza; an empire where Will is the coveted magic that gives one man the strength of twenty.

Sixteen-year-old Olesya, the tsar’s strong-Willed only child, has spent her life trying to get her father to acknowledge her existence. When the tsar hosts a tournament to determine his successor, Olesya dares to hope he will revoke the ridiculous law that forbids women from ruling and choose her as his competitor. Instead he picks Russ, a talented beggar, as his champion.

Russ walks into the court with nothing but the clothes on his back . . . and a secret; he’s not the beggar he pretends. He has been trained since birth by an underground organisation to win the tournament, assassinate the tsar, and abolish the laws of Kaza, that have enslaved Unwilled people for centuries. To survive among the scheming nobles, Russ clings to one rule: Don’t form any attachments. Everything goes according to plan as Russ wins one match after another, until he breaks his own rule and falls in love with the tsar’s defiant daughter.

Olesya has plans of her own. Blind with jealousy at Russ, she does what no woman has ever dared: challenge the tsar’s champion to a battle of Wills. But Russ may be more than a match for her, and no matter how hard she tries, she can’t deny the growing attraction between them.

When the tsar is murdered before the tournament ends, he leaves behind an empty throne and an empire on the brink of civil war. Caught at the heart of the conflict, Russ and Olesya are forced to pick sides and ultimately choose between love, loyalty, and ambition.

This is a dual narrative.

First 250:

RUSS’ NARRATIVE

The sunset reflected off the snow and white limestone, making the open-pit mine look like a great basin of blood.

An apt resemblance, I thought as the gong echoed through the quarry, signalling the end of the working day.

I let the brick slip from my frostbitten hands and crouched for a moment, savouring the strain leaving my arms. The ache in my back dulled as I took slow, deep breaths, a cloud of vapour forming before my face. The snow blanketing the stone beckoned me to lie down, close my eyes . . .

“Snow is a grave, not a bed,” A voice whispered in the back of my mind. The memory of a frozen corpse made me surge to my feet and I bit my tongue not to scream as movement brought life back to my limbs.

I lurched down the staired walls and found Alexei on a ledge near the centre of the pit, curled up beside a rusted shovel.

“Wake up,” I whispered, turning him over and disentangling the scrawny ball of knees and elbows.

His mismatched eyes fluttered open, never failing to startle me. There was something unnatural about the proportions of his face. His eyes were too large, slanted at the corners, and the contrast between the ice-blue and black-brown of his irises made even the Kazich look twice. His mouth and nose were thin and small, as if he wasn’t meant to speak or smell, only to see.

“Is it morning?” he murmured.