Excerpt from Deathly Fates by Tesia Tsai, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter One

As always, I smelled death before I saw it. The odor was gut-deep, a blend of sickly-sweet and putrid rot. Most humans rushed away from such a scent, not toward it.

But I was a ganshi priestess, a shepherd of the dead, and I'd been offered forty thousand silvers to retrieve a corpse from enemy territory.

I approached the abandoned battleground, a large, rugged

field. The yellowed grass had been trampled by heavy boots and horse hooves, human waste mixing with mud made from past ram.

People always assumed the iron tang of blood would be strongest, if blood was present at all in death. But it was the stench of excrement, released after the body's muscles failed, that prompted me to wrap a scarf around my nose and mouth.

Accustomed to death as I was, I couldn't help but shudder as I took in the field. Roughly a hundred dead Sian soldiers littered the cursed ground. Arrows and spears jutted from the earth like snapped bones. Even the trees framing one side of the land looked forlorn, their branches bent in reverence toward the broken dead. Though it was early morning, the deep-orange sun looked as if it should be setting, not rising.

I took in the lineup of corpses and knew I had my work cut out for me.

But it was work that needed to be done.

As I stepped up to the nearest body, the clip-clop of horse hooves drew my attention backward. It was a Wen soldier, dressed in full armor, with his face obscured by an iron mask. I watched his eyes sweep over me, taking in my teal pao robe and peach staff.

He dipped his head in respect but didn't dismount. ''Are you here to collect, mistress?"

I was momentarily startled by the distinctly female voice. On the few occasions I'd crossed paths with members of the Wen military, I'd never noticed any women. Back home in Sian, all military personnel were male.

Concealing my surprise, I pulled out a Fu talisman and said, "As you see."

Ganshi priests and priestesses had immunity when it came to working across borders. Smuggling goods, on the other hand, was the exception.

But the soldier couldn't possibly suspect me of that, I told myself.

"Which side?" the soldier asked sullenly.

''Are you authorized to arrest a ganshi priestess based on the affiliation of her clientele?"

The soldier pursed her lips but didn't argue. She turned her horse around, toward the town. Before riding off, she said, ''A team will arrive near sundown to bury the dead. You'd best be gone by then:'

"Rest assured, I will be."

I secretly hoped I was right. Usually I was hired by grieving relatives whose child or sibling had passed away in a distant city. It was always obvious who and where the corpse was. I'd never had to search for a body before. I'd never even been to a battlefield. Propelled by the soldier's warning, I quickly got to work inspecting the corpses for identification papers and comparing dirtied, ashen faces to the portrait that Official Yi, the man who'd hired me, had provided. The dead soldiers had been preserved fairly well, despite having been there for a week. Perhaps it was the colder temperature.

I noticed that the bodies, arranged neatly in rows, had already been relieved of anything worth money—metal weaponry and armor, personal tokens, cash. The fractured polearms and arrows scattered about were missing their steel tips as well.

The victors were astonishingly efficient. I didn't know the precise circumstances of the battle, but it looked like an ambush. It seemed the Wen army had prevailed in more ways than one. War was a lucrative business. And considering how the Sian monarchy had been leeching off the Wen territory's re-sources for years, it made sense that Wen was desperate for any gain.

I waded through the sea of lifeless soldiers, many of whom had been conscripted like pieces on the Sian king's xiangqi board. I had to remind myself to hold my sympathy at bay. Objectivity was crucial to being a priestess.

Excerpted from Deathly Fates by Tesia Tsai. Copyright © 2026 by Tesia Tsai. Excerpted by permission of Wednesday Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.