They are savage and brutal, I know this. I’ve spent months joining them on their hits, bombing, flooding, and causing as much damage as possible. They are the enemy of the state. They have been planning for months to assassinate the king. While I have helped I have relayed information back home.

Home. Maybe it’s been too long but that word doesn’t seem right anymore. I have spent months living in perpetual disgust with them and myself for what I had to do to protect the realm, but now… I’m not sure about anything anymore.

“Don’t just stand there!”

I am pushed and jostled towards the inferno. My ears are numb to the screams but the acrid smell of burning flesh chokes me with every breath. Not something I could ever get used to.

I avert my eyes, swallowing bile as a group carry a limp body past me. This was not supposed to happen. It was supposed to be a simple extraction. Raid the base and take a small number of them including me. A few unlucky ones would die but not this kind of destruction. This needless death.

I am moving before I fully know what I’m doing. I join the chain passing water to the burning building I should be going to the extraction point but I need to help. All I had been told about them crossed through my mind again. They were vermin, a disease. They needed to be beaten into submission but I had not expected this extermination. Or had I? Had I been naive, or wilfully ignored the worrying messaging?

I thought I couldn’t hear the screams anymore but the sound of agony, panic and fury made my blood run cold as burned and bloody Mrs Kepler was dragged away from the blaze.

“I have to help, Let me help!” she screeched, fighting the two men who carried her away. She had been kind, and caring. She could have been useful to us. I wasn’t supposed to think of them like that but she had the softest touch I had ever encountered. She wasn’t like them. Neither were the others burning in that building. Why had they, we, done this? Why target the school? The tiny bodies of three children were carried past. I recognised the wild shock of red curls on one of them, Mary. She was a curious one. Always rooting through my things for treats but never malicious. Innocent. All the children were. The plan had been to take the adults not burn the children.

“They’ve broken through the gate!”

I leave my place in the chain. Where am I going? I don’t know if I want to join them, my people, or kill them all. I yearn for home, the one I’d known before. Where I was safe and believed in the power of the realm but I know I can never go back there.

I am moving to the breached gate but turn before I reach it. There’s a hole in the fence which I used to sneak in and out of the base camp. He’ll be here. The knights are murdering their way through the base. They know the layout, where they keep the weapons, the food. I told them.

I cannot stay but will not leave. I will die here. But I will take him with me. I will kill the king.

I read this and was hooked. I read it quicker than any book before. Got me out of my reading slump. I thought the ending was great. Not to spoil anything but I read the last word and burst into sobs and didn't stop until I called my mum. One of the best books I've read.

It happens so rarely but I love reading/hearing about people hating this book series. I only read the first one and could not understand why it became so popular.

I felt the same way. I was reading it when the movie first came out (so it's been a while) and wanted to finish the book before seeing the film but when I finished the book I was so done with the story I almost didn't go only to find that the movie, while not great, was entertaining.

The actors and more concise storytelling greatly improved the story. All while reading the book I just felt like it was just going through the motions to hit certain story beats.