Broken Souls and Bones

Flames devour a village in the knolls.

Flames devour a village in the knolls. A girl, too small to fight, is torn from her burning home by a cloaked figure who presses leather fingers over her eyes—the silver scars must stay hidden. He cuts her throat with a knife, not to kill but to murmur a spell that will unravel her memories of this night. A second boy's voice cracks with uncertainty before the older man silences him. The girl is handed to a tide wanderer on a longship, carried to sea while her past unspools behind her like smoke. The last thing she sees before exhaustion takes her: a figure on the shore wearing the double-headed raven of Dravenmoor, the enemy kingdom, flames rising at his back.

A mute Draven sentry hunts a hidden melder who pelts him with fruit

In Stonegate, the fortress of King Damir, a young Stav guard is found slaughtered—chest flayed, ribs cracked apart. Roark Ashwood, a mute Draven-born warrior called the Death Bringer, serves as Sentry to Prince Thane and blames himself. Thane delivers darker news: a blood crafter in the coastal village of Skalfirth has identified a woman carrying melder blood—the rarest craft in the realm. The previous melder, Fadey, was murdered beyond the gates, and Damir is desperate for a replacement. Roark and Captain Baldur are ordered to retrieve her. In Skalfirth, Lyra Bien disguises the silver scars in her eyes with stinging thorn blossom dye and lives invisibly as a servant. When a cloaked stranger rifles through her fruit cart, she bombards him with bruised plums—having just assaulted the kingdom's deadliest man.

Baldur kills the traitor and forces Lyra to meld or watch Kael die

At the Skalfirth feast, Captain Baldur poisons Vella—the jarl's supposed seer, actually a blood crafter Damir planted to find the lost melder. He reveals she sold Lyra's location to Dravenmoor. The village's bone crafters are forced to their knees: Lyra, her adoptive brother Kael—a disowned jarl's son—and two siblings, Hilda and Edvin. When Lyra refuses to confess, Emi Nightlark, a Draven bone crafter serving the Stav, shatters Kael's ribs under Roark's command. Lyra must meld a soul bone into his shattered chest or let him die. Her hands find golden threads only she can see, stitching dead bone to living. She slips into a frozen mirror world for the first time, where a cowled phantom demands that stolen souls be paid in living blood. Kael breathes again. Lyra is claimed for Stonegate.

Lyra's midnight escape ends at the jaws of a fara wolf On the journey to Stonegate, Lyra claws through the dirt floor of Roark's camp hut and slips into the haunted Phantom Forest, desperate…