The Winterheart

Thessaly Hargrove kneels at her father's cairn when the ice cracks, an impossible, hairline fracture running through a kingdom where the dead are meant to sleep eternal. Maren Hargrove, the kingdom's most trusted warden, was executed three days ago for treason against King Roderic, his dying confession swallowed by the storm. His secrets, Old Mab whispers from her hut of brittle pine, were not confessions at all but keys, keys to a seal that holds the Frostmother Ygrath beneath the Winterheart itself. Now that seal is failing, and Thessaly is the only one marked to walk the Frozen Road and renegotiate the old bargain. To reach the heart of the winter, she must first survive Aldric Vane, the king's hound who scents treason in her blood, and untangle the cryptic loyalties of Cassian Vey, a court physician whose scalpel knows too much about what was buried with her father's body. The wild thing in the hedge, Bramble Thorne, insists the Hargroves owe a debt to something older than kings. Refusing the call means watching her father's ghosts pour through the breaking world. Accepting it means surrendering the only warm thing left inside her chest.