The Butcher of Hollowmere
Maren Voss has spent her life walking past towns that are dying , Thornwall where the river ran white, Caer Dunmore where the stones screamed and split , and she has learned the only wisdom that matters: keep your eyes on the road and let the rot pass. But when she rides through the cinder-strewn Ashenmere gate into Hollowmere, she cannot keep her gaze down. A woman in a hood has been following her for days. A lean hound named Cale watches her from the alleys. And in the town square, the mayor dangles from the chapel eaves, his throat opened in a ritual only the locals seem to recognize. They call him the Shepherd , though others name him the Butcher of Hollowmere. He moves through the fever-warm streets in black, carving the corrupt from the rafters of their own churches, and the broken town blesses him for it. Maren is pulled into his orbit by Brother Ulth, by the cartographer who maps the spreading sickness, by a child whose face will not stop changing, and by Sera Quill, who has waited her whole life for a reckoning she no longer believes in. Among them stalks Grieve , a thing that wears a saint's bones like armor , and the Carrion Saint herself, patient in her cathedral of meat. As the rot spreads and the hanging trees grow heavy with the named, Maren must decide what kind of woman she is willing to become: witness, accomplice, or the blade itself. Because the Shepherd is coming for someone , and the hooded woman at Maren's side already knows who.