Ashley Hernandez

After years of leading the battle against the vicious Darrow Raiders, Lieutenant-Rider Laren Mapstone has built a fortress around herself to conceal her emotions and the deep scars she carries. When she is made mentor to Tavin Bankside, a Green Rider trainee on his first message errand, her cold and brooding exterior quickly earns her the moniker the “Ice Lady”.

After her capture at the hands of Grandmother and the Second Empire, Karigan G'ladheon is making halting progress toward recovery. Karigan takes on increasingly dangerous missions, haunted by the specter of her torturer, Nyssa, and sinking ever further into the mire of her recollections of the past and the losses she's sustained.

I’ve been harboring a dark secret for two long years. I’ve been fantasizing about my fiancé’s father, thinking filthy thoughts that a good daughter-in-law should not be indulging in. So when I catch my fiancé cheating on me, there’s only one revenge that will fulfill all my needs. I’m going to seduce his father. It’s dirty and it’s wrong, and I don’t care. I want him, so I mean to have him. After this weekend, my ex won’t be the only one who calls his father Daddy.

Karigan G'ladheon is a Green Rider—a seasoned member of the elite messenger corps of King Zachary of Sacoridia. King Zachary sends Karigan and a contingent of Sacoridians beyond the edges of his nation, into the mysterious Blackveil Forest, which has been tainted with dark magic by a twisted immortal spirit named Mornhavon the Black.

Once a simple student, Karigan G'ladheon finds herself in a world of deadly danger and complex magic, compelled by forces she cannot understand when she becomes a legendary Green Rider-one of the magical messengers of the king. Forced by magic to accept a dangerous fate she would never have chosen, headstrong Karigan has become completely devoted to the king and her fellow Riders. But now, an insurrection led by dark magicians threatens to break the boundaries of ancient evil.

A thousand years ago, the armies of the Arcosian Empire, led by Mornhavon the Black, crossed the great sea and tried to conquer the land of Sacoridia - and during Karigan G’ladheon’s early years as a Green Rider, Mornhavon’s spirit, sensing weakness in his prison walls and seeking vengeance, began to wake.

Zachary Davriel Hillander, High King of Sacoridia, rues how much he has had to give up to lead his realm, including the freedom to live and love as he chooses. When an embassy from Eletia arrives to propose a joint venture between their realms to seek out an old ally in the north, he is dismayed to learn that the one Sacoridian they have in mind to accompany their guide is the woman he truly loves but cannot have: Green Rider Karigan G'ladheon.

Karigan G’ladheon, running away from school, is traveling through a deep forest when a galloping horse pounds up to her, its rider impaled by two black-shafted arrows. With his dying breath, he tells her he is a Green Rider, one of the magical messengers of the King. Before he dies, he makes Karigan swear to deliver the message he’s carrying, and gives her his green coat, with the symbolic brooch of his office.