The Blood of Winter

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.

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 reads, "All who seek mercy may enter."