Friday Memes: Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk

Happy Friday everybody!

Book Beginnings on Friday is now hosted by Rose City Reader. The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice. Check out the links above for the rules and for the posts of the participants each week. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

This week I am spotlighting Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk. I got this epic fantasy through the Amazon Vine program. This book was released on March 11. Here is the description:

This action-heavy EPIC FANTASY SERIES OPENER is like a sword-and-sorcerySpartacus set in a richly-imagined world.

It starts with a shipwreck following a magical storm at sea. Horace, a soldier from the west, had joined the Great Crusade against the heathens of Akeshia after the deaths of his wife and son from plague. When he washes ashore, he finds himself at the mercy of the very people he was sent to kill, who speak a language and have a culture and customs he doesn't even begin to understand.

Not long after, Horace is pressed into service as a house slave. But this doesn't last. The Akeshians discover that Horace was a latent sorcerer, and he is catapulted from the chains of a slave to the halls of power in the queen's court. Together with Jirom, an ex-mercenary and gladiator, and Alyra, a spy in the court, he will seek a path to free himself and the empire's caste of slaves from a system where every man and woman must pay the price of blood or iron. Before the end, Horace will have paid dearly in both.

Beginning:

Lightning split the night sky above the masts of the Bantu Bay. Thunder boomed amid the driving wind, shaking the carrack's timbers, and then darkness returned to smother everything.

Friday 56:

He hated these people, especially this haughty aristocrat with his unholy powers. All of a sudden, Horace's arms and legs were free of the eerie paralysis. He leapt without thinking, diving toward the lord with both hands extended.