Tamsin Sheridan — Fantasy Author

What price is worth paying to hold the darkness back?

Three months after the death of her familiar, Ava Corvine returns to the forest to do what comes next. She is deep in the old trees, her purpose clear, when a stranger comes crashing out of the caves below the rowan tree with something ancient and many-limbed behind him.

This is not what she came for. She helps him anyway.

Orren Blackwell has spent twenty years following old journals to stranger and stranger places. He knows the sort of darkness that lives in the deep places of the world. He is unprepared for Ava and for Pence, the ancient silver fox who arrives to serve as her familiar, dry of wit and burdened with fragmented ancestral memory. And he is even less prepared for what begins to grow between himself and Ava as the village starts to die around them.

They will venture into the darkness together to stop what’s coming. The darkness, it turns out, was also the only thing holding the world back from something worse.

Some bindings hold an ancient hunger back. Some hold two people together before either is ready.

What would you give to hold back the end of the world?

Ava Corvine thought she understood the price of holding the darkness at bay. She understood nothing at all.

Now, she and Orren Blackwell are walking the oldest roads in the Bounded Lands, following the trail of the first compact through country that grows more beautiful and more strange with every mile. What her family has refused to face for generations is waiting at the end of it. The farther they travel, the more Ava fears she already knows what it will ask of her.

Between Ava and Ren, something has begun to grow. But Ren has carried his silence for twenty years, and there are doors he has never once let anyone open. Ava has her own. They will not reach the end of this journey unchanged, and they will not reach it with everything still unsaid.

The world is falling apart around them, and every mile carries them closer to a reckoning neither is ready to face.

Some prices can only be paid by the one willing to pay them. Some things can only be said at the end of the world.

Lark Silvertree has blood on her hands. Quite a lot of it, actually.

Twenty-five years ago, she escaped the massacre that destroyed her enclave and everyone she loved. What she became after? Well, that was the price of survival. She’s made peace with being a monster.

Now she’s returned to the frozen ruins of Wintersorrow, hunting for answers. But she’s not the only one searching. Rion Palinore, a scholar with a black wolf and an irritating habit of quoting ancient texts, has been hired to find survivors. He prefers books to blades, has no business traipsing through any ruins, and sees through every lie she tells.

Reluctant allies with too many secrets between them, they travel from the silver oaks of Wintersorrow to the crimson forests of Autumncrown, hunting the truth behind an ancient darkness. Someone wanted her enclave erased from history, and Lark may be the key to understanding why.

She’s spent a lifetime needing no one. Of course she’d find something worth living for just as the world starts to fall apart.

Lark Silvertree finally has people worth fighting for. The timing could be worse, but not by much.

War came to Autumncrown, and when the smoke cleared, Rion was gone. Taken by the Ashen Enclave. Lark will do whatever it takes to get him back. But rescue is only the beginning.

The man she saved isn’t the scholar who looked at her like she was a puzzle worth solving. He’s a shadow of who he was, and all the daggers in the world can’t fix that.

Safe in Springhope, for now, they have time. Time for Rion to heal. Time to convince an isolationist enclave that neutrality won’t save them from what’s coming.

Saving him was the easy part. Loving him while he learns to find himself again? That’s a battle she never trained for.

Lark Silvertree has spent twenty-five years running from her father. Now Theron Duskwood has found her, and his price for the lives of everyone she loves is her obedience.

Stripped of allies, imprisoned in his army camp, and forced to use her magic in service of his ambition, Lark faces a choice that will cost her everything, no matter which way she turns. She can refuse and watch the people she loves die. Or she can give her father control of the most powerful magical conduit in Ianorrah and hope she survives long enough to undo the damage.

She chooses love. Not everyone agrees with the price.

When the man she loves discovers what she’s done to save him, it threatens to destroy the only thing she wasn’t willing to lose. And with Duskwood’s grip tightening on Summerbright, a city suffocating under occupation, and dark magic spreading like poison through the land, there is no time to heal what’s broken between them before the war begins.

To reclaim her future, Lark will have to face the battle she’s been running from her entire life. Not against her father’s army or his corrupted magic, but against the fear that loving someone will always end in loss.