Kashin · The full story

The general who trusted his gut

Everyone told him his little sister jumped. He was the only one who refused to believe it — and being right cost him more than being wrong ever could have.

THE SOLDIER SON

He picked the honest company of his troops over the double-talk of the court.

The tallest and most imposing of the khagan's six children, Kashin commands the khaganate's land armies — the foot soldiers and the Darghan horse-lords of the eastern steppes, his mother's people. Where Arghun schemes and Hasar sails, Kashin soldiers. He is his father Urus's fiercest defender and the one sibling who genuinely dislikes the intrigue of Antica, choosing to spend his year among warriors rather than viziers. Blunt, caring, loyal to a fault. It makes him the sibling Chaol Westfall likes best on sight, and the one who lets a foreign envoy in far enough to see what is rotting at the heart of the khagan's own house.

YRENE

He loved a healer who chose her own path over a prince, and never stopped.

The summer before, Yrene Towers travelled to the steppes where Kashin lives among the horse-lords, and for a while they were together. She ended it — not from any coldness, but because she would not trade her healing for a life tied to a throne. Kashin carries the feeling anyway. So it stings on two fronts across the book: Hasar keeps jesting that Yrene should marry Kashin to seal an alliance with Adarlan, and Kashin has to watch Yrene fall, quietly and completely, for the paralysed captain he brought to his family's dinners. He is the man who lost the healer to the outsider he liked.

TUMELUN

He handed a stranger the one suspicion he couldn't prove.

His youngest sister Tumelun — who rode with him among the Darghan — is dead before the book opens. The court calls it suicide: she leapt from a balcony in one of her moods. Kashin does not believe a word of it. But he is a general, not a spymaster, and he cannot prove murder inside his father's palace. So he does the only thing left to him: he seeks out Chaol, an outsider who deals in security and intrigue, and asks him to keep his eyes open for anything strange at court. It is grief with nowhere to go, handed to the one person who might catch what he can't.

RIGHT, AND THE COST

His gut was right the whole time. He'd have given anything for it to be wrong.

The rot has a name, and it is his other sister. Duva is possessed by a Valg princess sent by Erawan, and the demon confesses it murdered Tumelun for growing suspicious — hiding behind Duva's gentle, harmless reputation. Kashin's instinct is vindicated at the worst possible price. And still, when the demon is cornered inside the sister who killed the sister he loved, Kashin asks Yrene to save Duva rather than destroy her. That choice — loyalty over vengeance — lets Yrene purge the Valg and spare both Duva and her unborn child, and the khagan's gratitude is the exact lever that finally brings the khaganate's armies into Aelin's war.