Where Briars Burn
In the mist-veiled village of Hollowmere, where peat smoke coils through every cottage and the marsh keeps its dead, Elara Veylan has spent her life trying to outrun the inheritance her grandmother swore to bury. The Veylan women are Briar Witches, bound by blood to a living chain that holds Malachar the Unbound beneath the roots of the world. When Grandmother Yew dies on a night of black rain and creeping thorn, the wards begin to unravel, and the hollow places in the wood start whispering Elara's true name. Fleeing with the enigmatic peddler Harrow, the disgraced soldier Kael Ashworth, and Wren, a sharp-tongued orphan who trusts no one, Elara is hunted by shadow-crows and by Lord Commander Theron Marrick, whose iron-willed Captain Lisbeth Vale has orders to bring the last Veylan to the capital in chains, or in pieces. In the capital, Prince Aldric Veranthos plays a courtly game whose stakes are older than his bloodline, while Old Brenna's half-remembered prophecies begin to bloom like blood in water. The deeper Elara runs, the closer the Unbound stirs. To save the kingdom from a rising darkness, she must decide whether to surrender the briar's power to those who would twist it into a weapon, or kindle it herself and risk becoming the very monster her bloodline was forged to cage.