I haven't read this book and I'm not entirely sure of the author's politics (he seems all right on Twitter) but it's the Barra the Pict duology by Matthew Stover. Now, because I am a man-child, I love Stover for his Star Wars books, and I only found out he wrote these historical fantasies because he mentioned he was on a panel with a well-known military Fantasy author who "found Barra completely preposterous. A female mercenary in the Bronze Age? He couldn’t buy it...He spent a couple minutes going on about how stupid it was, until I piped up to tell him I wrote it, and described my research. Don’t recall he had much to say after that." And I thought that was a cool, so I bought a copy.

Unfortunately, the only official ebook of this duology was released on a now defunct website. I checked Annas Archive and they're not there. I actually paid for a used copy of the omnibus edition, Heart of Bronze, which was reasonably priced at $15 but probably not something I would've done except I knew I already liked the author.

Also, while I can say from his twitter feed that Stover isn't a MAGA chud, he is a white boomer man, so I don't expect him to have politics any better than your average lib. But honestly my bar for American fantasy writers is that they just not be .

In summary: I haven't read this book you probably can't find a copy of, and I cannot vouch for the author's politics, but I really like his Revenge of the Sith novelization. Plus his Science Fantasy series Acts of Caine which I think is about a time-traveling assassin or something is supposed to be really good, but I haven't read that either. I wrote all this so I'm going to click post, but I recognize it's been a waste of time for both me writing this and you reading it.