The Aelf-King Sagas · Book I
They burned the people who could hear the earth sing.
Where the witch trials made a legend. A novel of the Iron Century. December 1, 2026.
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
I have seen what fire does to a woman who will not stop singing.
From the chronicle of Père Noël
The Book
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The Aelf-King Sagas
The Blood of Winter opens the road. Two more sagas carry it to its turning. The covers are revealed below; the stories are being set down.
Book Two
The second saga. A novel of what it costs to be known.
The warmth returns, and the country does not know whether to kneel or to burn.
The long winter breaks, and what survives the cold finds that summer asks its own price. In a land still learning the shape of mercy, a name travels ahead of the one who carries it, and a warmth that once had to hide is asked, now, to stand in the open.
Book Three
The final saga. The turning of the longest night.
When the long silence ends, the earth answers in a voice no fire could take.
The road that began in blood and passed through summer comes, at last, to its midnight. A chronicler writes from a long silence, setting down the things he outlived and the names the world gave him without asking.
The Legends
A free legend from the Aelf-King Legends, the prequel the trilogy never stops to tell. Choose how you would keep it, and it will find your inbox: a telling to read, or a telling aloud.
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The Chronicle
Dispatches from a world being set down as it is found. Lore, fragments from the chronicle, and first word when the book is released. One letter a month.
Your name is in the chronicle. The next dispatch will find you.
THE AELF-KING'S HEARTH
Every book gathers its first circle before the world arrives. The Hearth is that circle: a small community of readers of the Chronicle of Mercy who keep the fire while the Sagas are made.
Members hold the current advance read of The Blood of Winter, in ebook and audiobook, pinned above the fire, and they are the first to see what comes next.
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