My Alpha Hates Me, But I’m Dying

The empire holds that women do not fight and does not make exceptions. Leah kills a troll to keep her mother alive, and the reward for it is a marriage handed down to her, to a lord who turns out to be cruel in the ordinary daily way. Her mother takes the torture that comes of arranging her escape and does not give her up. Leah gets out. What follows is the sacred sword, which wakes for her when it has no business waking for anyone of her sex, and a sage who takes her on and trains her without asking the empire's opinion. She uses that training on the leader of the rebellion, gets her mother back out of the hands that were holding her, and stands in front of an empire that has to look at what she did and decide what to do with a rule it can no longer say is true.