The Edge of Winter - Softcover

Le Long, Katy

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798176260342

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

The ward-fires are dying. Nobody in the realm knows why.

For three hundred years the fires along the Rime line have held back an endless winter, and for three hundred years the Order of the Ember has stood at the cold stones and kept them burning — and never once asked what a fire burns.

Ser Kaelin Thorne has been paying for eleven years without being told. When a ward-fire goes out in the market town of Kestrelford, the only person alive who can relight it is a nineteen-year-old kitchen girl who has never been further from home than the square. Elara Veyne has spent her life being nobody. She is, in fact, the last of the house whose blood lights the fires — and the last line of an account nobody has presented to her.

Because the fires are not fuelled by blood. They are fuelled by memory. Every warm night the realm has had for three centuries was bought with something a family forgot on purpose, and the Emberhold keeps a ledger listing every one of them: a song, a smell, a sister's face, the name of a man who taught a girl to hold a sword. The realm's great houses know. They were told the price. They voted yes in a single sitting, and they have been warm ever since.

Now Elara has to decide whether to keep paying — and Kaelin has to decide whether to keep guarding the woman she is quietly spending. A foundling. A knight who is herself a sacrifice she was never told about.

A winter that is not weather but appetite. And one road north, which everyone in the realm was raised never to look at.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798176260342
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236