The Wind Weaver

Two centuries before Rhya's birth, mortal armies overthrew the fae empire in a bloody uprising called the Cull.

Two centuries before Rhya's birth, mortal armies overthrew the fae empire in a bloody uprising called the Cull. Maegic was declared a sin. The emperor's bloodline was extinguished. Halflings were hunted, their culture erased — not just the people but their music, architecture, customs, and maps. In the aftermath, mortal paper kings carved the continent into warring fiefdoms, strip-mining the land until even the soil turned sick. Crops failed, children were born wrong, the earth seemed to be dying — a blight creeping outward from the wound the mortals had torn in the fabric of the world. Into this poisoned inheritance, a girl is born bearing a mark no one can explain.

A masked soldier kills his own men to free a halfling.

Rhya hangs from a tree in an Eastwood camp, blindfolded, noosed, iron shackles scorching her wrists to sinew. Soldiers bicker about when to execute her — they await Commander Scythe's sign-off. When he arrives, he examines her strange birthmark without touching it, then forces her eyes open in the torchlight. Something in them makes his composure crack — one word, barely audible: impossible. Seconds later, his sword opens the captain's throat. Five men fall in a single heartbeat. The rest scatter and are hunted down. Scythe cuts Rhya's noose and bindings, then throws her facedown across his stallion Onyx. She is traded from one captor to another, rescued by a man who offers no explanation.

Her captor nurses her fever, then refuses to explain why.

For days, Rhya rides facedown across Onyx's back, lashed like cargo. Scythe pushes relentlessly north — through forests, across frozen plainlands, past marching companies they avoid in silence. When fever seizes Rhya, threatening to kill her, he removes her iron shackles and tends her through the night. She wakes in a cave to find he has built a fire, cooked a rabbit, and left soap and a clean tunic by a bathing pool. His actions speak of care; his words remain granite. He feeds her, gives her salve for her wounds, and wraps his cloak around her against the snow — yet refuses to name their destination, his employer, or his purpose. She exists, he tells her, by his leave alone.

A freak vortex defies physics on a collapsing bridge. Red-armored enemy soldiers catch them at a ravine spanned by a rickety rope bridge — their only route into the Northlands. Arrows rain as Rhya leads Onyx across the groaning slats. Her foot punches through a rotten board and she plummets, catching herself by her fingertips. She cannot pull herself up. Then the air…