The Ash Crown Cycle
For sixty-three days, Sigurd Vrell has shoveled the dead into the lime pits of a kingdom rotting from the inside out. The realm has no rightful ruler, only the Ash King , a corpse seated on a throne no one dares approach , and the desperate lords who circle him like crows. When a dying prisoner presses a burned fragment of parchment into Sigurd's hand and names the location of the Ash Crown, Sigurd becomes the most dangerous man alive: a gravedigger who knows where a god's power is buried. Word spreads through the wrong mouths. Hadrian Vane, a chancellor clinging to the illusion of order, dispatches Severn Halloway to silence the witness. Brenna Ashgrove, a noblewoman whose house has bled for every succession, begins her own hunt for the Crown , and for the brother she believes still serves the old faith. Brother Kael Ashgrove, long exiled from the order that once crowned kings, is summoned back from the salt wastes by a prophecy he spent years trying to forget. Dael Rennick and Yul Kessen, deserters turned sellswords, sell their swords to whoever promises the largest share of the ruin. And Maren Idrith, the physician who tends the dying Ash King, begins to suspect the corpse on the throne is not as lifeless as the court pretends. Each faction believes the Crown will make their claim unbreakable. Sigurd knows only that whoever reaches it first will unmake the others , and possibly the world with them. As the dead begin to whisper back and Tyrven Halloway's hunters close in, the gravedigger must choose what kind of king he is willing to become, or whether he is willing to become one at all.