NEW RELEASE: The Golden Daughter – Dayna Ingram

QSFer Dayna Ingram has a new lesbian fantasy book out, The Empire of Flesh and Gold book 1: The Golden Daughter.

Is the Golden Daughter a monster created by vile magic? A fabled assassin whose many victims are turned to gilded statues? Perhaps Liddy Vanya is both. The king’s daughter is his greatest weapon against his political enemies: her touch transforms flesh into pure gold.

But her service to the crown is entirely forced, as Liddy’s young life has been one marked by cruelty and abuse. Until the moment she decides to murder her father. But when you are the most infamous and feared killer in all the land, even the most satisfying of assassinations can be a perilous endeavor, especially when a former lover is hunting you down.

Filled with intrigue and passion, The Golden Daughter is an exciting tale similar in vein to the works of Jane Fletcher or Audrey Coulthurst.

Warnings: patricide.

Get It At Amazon | Publisher | Goodreads

Excerpt

Tonight was the night Liddy Vanya would kill her father.

If only she could peel herself away from the shadows long enough to do it. Stop her hands from shaking. Take a breath deeper than a hiccup. Get up from her hiding place and just do it.

It would be so much easier if she could touch him. A poetic laying on of hands. She wouldn’t even need her whole hand; the tip of her finger would do. A little skin-to-skin and he’d turn into gold before he even felt her, dead before the dense metal magic’d itself fully around his flesh and spread to his innards. She’d finally be able to look him in the eye, then. The eyes of a statue were far easier to confront than the eyes of the man who’d cursed her.

As night curled around her father’s bedchamber, Liddy forced herself to step away from the bookcase she’d wedged herself behind. The room was large and seemed to swallow sound, the scraping of her boots eaten by the ornate rug, the hitch of her breath divided into a meal for the dry hearth and the four-poster bed. Ever since he’d taken sick, her father demanded the cold and the dark, as if his body were readying itself for the empty concrete slab of its tomb. He lay now only feet from her, matching her shallow breaths, punctuating his wheezes with wet, hacking coughs that barely satiated the consuming hollow of his chamber.

Liddy crept across the rug. She walked wide, avoiding the moonlight slicing through the open northern-facing window she’d climbed through hours ago. She didn’t want him to see her yet, although she knew it didn’t matter if he did. If he saw her and screamed, there was no one near enough to hear him. If he saw her and did nothing, just stared, or, worse, beckoned her closer—Liddy didn’t trust herself not to turn on her heel and flee. As it was, this was as close to her father as she’d been in years. He delivered his assignments to her via his proxy, her uncle, the second man she intended to kill after tonight. Hopefully the last, but things did not often go as Liddy hoped.

She stood by the foot of his bed now. His reek met her, filling her flared nostrils with the stench of bile, soiled sheets, and the coppery tang of all the blood he kept coughing up. His life rattled in his throat, his eyes on the ceiling. He looked old, withered, small. Liddy’s blood flushed with fear, and she clenched her fists to suffuse this with anger. What she ended up with was shame: shame at her child-like fright, shame that she had ever been afraid, that she’d allowed him and her uncle to control her for so long, that she hadn’t stolen into this bedchamber sooner, knife sheathed at her thigh, and slit his throat once and for all.

But it wasn’t simple fear that kept her at bay, Liddy knew. It was her father’s curse, her uncle’s spell. The curse made her a killer by the touch of her skin, but it also protected her father and uncle from being touched. Well, she could touch them, but they wouldn’t turn to gold; by benefit of having cast the spell, they were immune to its consequence. In the ten years since they’d cursed her, lord knows Liddy’d had no desire to get close enough to either man to touch him—at least, no desire she would ever admit to. By the same token, neither man could harm Liddy, not physically, at any rate. If the spark of ill intent flamed to life within either of them, the magic they’d cursed her with snuffed it out before it could engulf them. Not that either man would want to kill Liddy; she was their cash cow, their golden goose, her uncle’s prized possession and her father’s treasured assassin. They would never lift a hand against her, even if they could. They needed her.

For a long time, Liddy’s fear convinced her she needed them as well. Her fear convinced her of many things. But when her uncle left Arryn Isle on an excursion to the Continent, some of that fear abated, her bindings loosened, and the flame of ill intent in her own heart sparked anew.

At the foot of her father’s bed, Liddy unsheathed her knife. In her mind, she slithered atop him like a snake. The weight of her pinned his frail body to the bed, and she trapped his arms beneath the blankets. When he looked at her, his eyes mirrored her fear, and he drowned in it. He gagged and gurgled around an apology, a plea for his life, an absolution of his underestimation of his only daughter. She brushed her knuckles tenderly down his cheek, and shushed him with the lullaby of her blade slipped across the arteries of his throat as smoothly as a chef’s knife through butter.

Author Bio

Dayna Ingram is a queer genre fiction writer from Ohio. He earned his BA in Creative Writing from Antioch College, and his MFA from San Francisco State University. He is the author of EAT YOUR HEART OUT and ALL GOOD CHILDREN, both of which received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly. The latter was also chosen by both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews Indie as one of the Best Science Fiction titles of 2016, and was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award. He lives in Kentucky with his spouse, their children, and an ungodly amount of pets.