The Story
A hunted boy. A condemned healer. The child she would not give to the fire.
The earth still sings, through root and stone and deep water, and the few who can hear it have learned to keep it secret. In a hollow beneath a hill, a boy is raised on that music and taught to hold the cold itself in his hands. He is half of something the world has spent a century learning to burn.
When the hunters come, they take the one person who understood what he is, and leave him a locket, a grief, and a country full of smoke. On the road south he finds Elizabeth, a healer condemned for curing fevers and coaxing herbs to grow out of season, and the infant daughter she will not surrender. Two strangers tie their survival to the same frozen branch, and run.
Ahead lies the one city whose gates still stand open, where a tired king must weigh mercy against twenty thousand lives, and where a red banner over the eastern gate reads, All who seek mercy may enter. And in a boy who answers cruelty with small, deliberate mercy, a figure the world will one day soften into a symbol begins, very quietly, to wake.
For readers of Katherine Arden and Guy Gavriel Kay
