The Anointing

"Give us a king," the elders said. "Like the port cities have."
The old man told them what a king would cost. Their sons for his levy, their daughters for his household, a tenth of their grain and the last of their arguments. They said yes anyway.
So the nine valleys of Harun get Han Muyeol: a farmer's son a head taller than any man alive, brave, generous, and hollow at the centre. He wins his first wars. He is loved. And then a shepherd boy from the southern valleys kills a champion at a river ford with a sling and a stone, and the women come out to sing the army home, and the song counts thousands to the king and tens of thousands to the boy.
Everything that happens afterwards happens because of a song.
A hunt through the hills that lasts nine years. A shrine town destroyed by a man who is thanked for it once. A friendship that costs a prince his crown. Two nights when the boy holds the king's life in his hand and gives it back. And a black stone with an oath cut round its edge, taken by raiders in the third year of the kingdom, that waits thirty years in a foreign harbour for someone to carry it home.
The Anointing is the second novel in The Crown and the Covenant. It stands entirely alone.
For readers of court intrigue, war and rivalry, and stories about what power does to the men who want it most.