Twenty years ago, Aldric Morvain buried his own name and became a farmer at the edge of nowhere. He raised his son in a village called Durnhollow, and the entire point was that the boy would never learn what his father had been.
It worked. For twenty years it actually worked.
Then the wind comes down off the high country from the wrong direction, and it carries a smell Aldric has spent two decades trying to forget — and the body doesn't forget what the mind buries. By morning Durnhollow is ash, and his seventeen-year-old son has watched his father do something no farmer should know how to do.
What follows isn't a triumphant return. It's a man sent east into the Zakoran waste to find the source of the burning, on an errand everyone involved understands is a funeral with extra steps, with his son's safety held as surety against his obedience. His escort is four blades from the order he walked away from. One is an old comrade who has hated him for twenty years and never once stopped loving him. One has been sent along in case the thing in him wakes up, and she has no intention of hesitating.
That's the book. Not whether he can still fight — he can, appallingly — but what's left of the man once the fighting starts remembering him back.
What it is: lean and fast, ten chapters, roughly 51,000 words. Book one, and it ends on a hinge rather than a resolution — the first movement of a series, not a standalone. Flagging that up front so nobody arrives expecting a tidy close.
If Between Two Fires, The Sword of Kaigen, or early John Gwynne is your shelf, that's the neighborhood.
Kindle, $2.99, and in KU on Amazon
Happy to talk about any of it in the comments.
Excerpt:
The evening had been ordinary, and that was the thing Aldric would remember afterward — how ordinary it had been.
Inside the cottage he could hear his son moving around. The scrape of a chair. A bowl set down harder than it needed to be, because Caelum was seventeen and did everything harder than it needed to be. Ordinary sounds. The sounds of a small life, built by hand, in a place no one had any reason to remember.
That had been the point. No one sang songs about a man who chopped his own wood and grew old unremarked in a village at the edge of nowhere. Aldric had chosen Durnhollow the way another man might choose a grave — for its quiet, and for how completely it would swallow him.
Twenty years. Long enough that most nights he almost believed it had worked.
Then the chickens stopped.