You’d think the worst thing they could send us was an army.
You’d be wrong. It was a gift.
The best summer of my life. Refugees fed, alliances forged, four bonds humming like a struck bell — and a blessing-stone sitting in our hall, polite as poison, waiting for a moon.
They didn’t come for my life. They came for my bonds. And when the rite fired, they cut one of them out of me while I watched.
Here’s what Coldbrook doesn’t understand about the girl they starved: I know exactly what everything costs. I have spent my whole life doing the math they taught me. And the price of one of my mates is everything they have ever built.
They want me to trade myself for him. My mates want to lock me in a tower until the war ends. Nobody in this valley has noticed yet that I stopped asking permission in the spring.
We’re going to get him.
This story continues in Unleashed.
