The Right of the Firstborn: A firstborn eighteen years of age or older may answer a call-to-arms from any noble family. The task, once completed, will mark the individual as an independent adult, free to leave their parents’ home, seek higher education or employment, purchase land, marry or not. This right may not apply to women in Jessa Copeland’s city but, when she hears that Rowan Eckersley needs volunteers to travel with him to the Forgotten Isle, she disguises herself as a man and answers the young lord’s call-to-arms. Rowan means to find the Lost Goddess who has struck their city with an incurable plague, and kill her before the plague takes his mother’s life. Jessa hopes to win her independence. Risking life and limb seems to her a small price to pay for the opportunity to escape her engagement to Beau, a man who would never permit her to go to school or learn a trade. Something else awaits Rowan and Jessa on the island, however, something far more dangerous than the goddess’s monsters and undead minions: true love. This is the first installment in a companion series for Asta and the Barbarians. Each new novella will introduce a couple who will be aiding Asta in a new mission in the long-awaited sequel, Asta among the Chosen.

On the day the Holgarians attack her town, Asta is blessed by a warrior god and is empowered with the heightened senses and unnatural healing abilities these foreign invaders possess. Grief-stricken and paralyzed by terror, she's hauled onto the conquering general's ship and taken across the sea. One year later, Asta graduates from warrior academy with honors and is chosen as one of the king's personal Defenders. She will finally have the opportunity to kill the man who gave the general his orders, and avenge her family. She doesn't expect the king to be young or kind, or completely oblivious of what his men are doing overseas. He has been told peaceful negotiations are going well. But Asta knows better. Asta must find proof of the general's treachery and bring it before the king so that she can save unconquered provinces from meeting the same fate as her hometown. But the king's counselors suddenly start dying, and the king himself is hounded by foreign assassins. Revenge will have to wait if Asta's going to keep the king, the mainland's only hope, alive.

This book offers a fantastic history of the 80-year period before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when it was being besieged at every turn by various barbarian tribes: the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Huns and more. Lecture six of the text is devoted to Attila the Hun and his dealings with the Roman Empire.