Excerpt from DAUGHTER OF CROWS by Mark Lawrence:
1 Molly Plight
The calm before this particular storm had lasted ten years, much of which Molly Plight had spent knitting. Trouble had arrived in the shape of a man of no great height, road-dirty and weather-beaten. Save for the cruel curve of the knife at his hip and the dull glint of mail beneath his fleece, there would have been nothing to mark him. But when he paused in the inn's doorway and smiled that smile, Molly knew that the peace she'd thought would claim her final days was over. She knew what a predator's hunger looked like.
"That bull the Millers have won't last another season." Jayne Clay, the tiny old woman on Molly's left, was given to predicting the death of prized livestock. That topic and regaling anyone who so much as paused in her vicinity with the doings of her two dozen towheaded grandchildren constituted the majority of her conversation.
Molly's needles and ball of yarn lay on the table before her, abandoned in favour of a pipe and a drink. The village children said the pipe smelled like a burning midden heap, perhaps not unfairly, but good weed was hard to find so far from anywhere. The small, thick glass in her hand held ulik, a treacle-dark liquor the locals brewed from turnips. She watched the mercenary cross to the bar. "Maybe."
"Maybe?" Doubt was a slap in the face where Jayne's predictions were concerned. Her ability to number the days of anything with hooves was legendary. "It's a certainty, girl!"
Molly sipped her ulik and made a face. Pipe smoke had numbed her tongue to the stuff's foulness, but she could still taste it. On her other side the third of their trio, Ambeth, hugged her ample belly and cackled at Molly being called a girl. Jayne and Ambeth might have a decade and more on Molly, but in no world that they knew of was anyone north of sixty summers a girl.
Cackled. Molly sipped again, winced again, and considered laughter. Age had blunted much of her sharpness, but in turn it had put a harsh edge on her voice and turned laughs into cackles. Still, if that was the worst the years had done to her she would consider herself blessed.
"Another round, girls?" Ambeth patted her coin pouch. She'd sold all the cheeses she'd brought into Stones Corner on Davy's cart, even the blue that stank worse than Vale pipe-weed, and for once could back her generous instincts with funds.
A "no" opened Molly's mouth but she bit down on it and shaped a "yes." One for the road. One to numb the aches before they walked the four miles back to Pye.
The tides that had left her stranded in the Vale a decade back had given no hint that her driftwood life had found its resting place. For the first few years everything had felt temporary-her pack ready by the door for a departure that never came. Instead, the slow and simple existence she'd picked up in the village of Pye had worked a strange magic on her. The steel spring that she had begun coiling in her chest at an age when she should have been chasing butterflies, or at least dreaming grand and empty dreams as she scratched a living from the soil, had started to unwind. The anger that she had for so many years bound ever more tightly at her core had somehow begun to seep away. The dark dreams, the watchful ways, the cynical poison that soured her days, all of it had started to leave her, worn away by passing seasons. Worn away by something as trivial as the community of peasants with no more learning among the lot of them than could be found in the head of any first-year acolyte of Kindness.
Ambeth struggled out of her seat and went to get the drinks, complaining of stiff legs. A mercenary wouldn't raise many eyebrows in the cities of the west, but out in the sticks where an oddly coloured pig could be the village's main subject of debate for several weeks, the man was drawing attention. Ambeth eyed him up and down as she approached, wrinkling her nose at the unfamiliar stink of him.
Molly stood, muttering something about the privy. It had been a long time since she'd been called on to do what had once been second nature to her. She had put all that aside, buried it both literally and figuratively. It had stayed buried so long that she had started to believe that that part of her life was over. She'd started to think that this was what her death might be, the slow setting aside of the things that had once defined her. A shedding of armour, one layer at a time. Until at last, she might go to her grave shriven of her burdens-stained by guilt but no longer defined by it.
She cursed as a second, larger man banged in through the street door, this one with a sword on his belt and a blackened iron breastplate. They had to be here for her. Nothing else made any sense. There wasn't anything a mercenary could carry away from the market of Stones Corner that would compensate the long ride to get to it.
Excerpted from DAUGHTER OF CROWS by Mark Lawrence Copyright © 2026 by Mark Lawrence. Excerpted by permission of Ace. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The survivor of a brutal academy must exhume her own past in the first book in a new series from the international bestselling author of the Library Trilogy and the Broken Empire series.
Set a thief to catch a thief. Set a monster to punish monsters.
The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies—known as the kindly ones—against whom even the gods hesitate to stand. Each year a hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three will emerge.
The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few that survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden. They have learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.
Only the most desperate would sell their child to the Kindnesses. But Rue … she sold herself. And now, a lifetime later, a long and bloody lifetime later, just as she has discovered peace, war has been brought to an old woman’s doorstep.
That was a mistake.
Fiction Adventure | Action | Fantasy Epic [ Penguin, On Sale: March 24, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780593818947 / eISBN: 9780593818930 ]
Mark Lawrence was born in Urbana–Champaign, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. He went back to the US after taking a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College to work on a variety of research projects including the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence programme. Returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He says he never had any ambition to be a writer so was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight. His first trilogy, THE BROKEN EMPIRE, has been universally acclaimed as a ground-breaking work of fantasy. Following The Broken Empire is the related RED QUEEN’S WAR trilogy. THE BOOK OF THE ANCESTOR trilogy is set on a different world and is followed by the related BOOK OF THE ICE trilogy. There is also THE IMPOSSIBLE TIMES trilogy, a D&D/sci-fi work set in London in the 80s. All of these trilogies can be read in any order. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol.
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