Heir Duology

About the Heir Duology series

Heir returns Sabaa Tahir to the world of An Ember in the Ashes roughly twenty years after that quartet's ending, with an entirely new cast confronting the Empire's ruins. Aiz is a lowborn orphan and thief driven by vengeance against the empire that destroyed her family; Sirsha is an exiled tracker taking on the kind of job that could get her killed; and Quil is the crown prince, a reluctant heir who wants no part of the throne he's about to inherit. A mysterious, escalating string of massacres pulls the three of them together across a fractured, still-scarred continent, forcing alliances none of them wants and romance none of them planned for.

Tahir builds Heir as accessible to readers new to this world -- prior knowledge of An Ember in the Ashes isn't required, though longtime fans will spot Easter eggs and see the political and magical fallout of the original quartet's ending playing out a generation later. The duology trades Ember's dual-narrator structure for a wider three-person rotating point of view and leans further into romantasy pacing, while keeping Tahir's signature unflinching violence and morally compromised characters.