The Embergrove Pact
Ten years after fleeing Thornmere in the dark of night, Evangeline Moss steps off a taxi and onto a road she swore she would never walk again. The village is the same, and not. The innkeeper Bramwell has summoned her home with warnings wrapped in riddles. A child called the Moth has begun appearing in doorways, and something is moving in the Embergrove, the ancient wood that rings the town and breathes against its windows at night. As Evangeline settles into the inn and begins sorting through her late grandmother Lisel's belongings, she uncovers a journal she was never meant to read, pages dense with half-remembered rituals, debts owed to things with antlers and wings, and the name of a figure her grandmother called the Alder King. The deeper she digs, the more she realizes Thornmere's survival has always depended on a bargain struck between her ancestors and the creatures of the grove, and that the bargain is now coming due. With the help of the fox-woman, a stranger named Aldwin Crane, and a young girl named Maren Renn who sees what others cannot, Evangeline must decide whether to honor a pact she never made or watch the village she abandoned burn. The grove is listening. The choice is hers.