Pete Tamisin

An epic fantasy for readers who came up on Tolkien — and stayed for the harder questions underneath.

Elias Estarfal was raised in an abbey and made a knight, and he has never doubted that serving the Light is worth a life. The question that troubles him is older and harder: if the Light knows the end of everything before it begins, is a man's yes his own, or was it always going to be given?

He is sent south on a simple errand — carry a sealed letter to a priest in a fading lake town, and bring the priest safely home. But Dahl is not what it was. The fish wash up dead. The fog will not lift. And the people have begun to turn on one another in a way no one can explain, as though something has reached into them, found the oldest wound, and pressed.

What waits in Dahl will not be answered by Elias's sword, though the sword will be needed. He falls in with strangers who should never have met — a ranger far from her forest, a knight from a dying mountain people, and a woman who has every reason to lie to him, and does. Together they learn that what is happening in one small town is happening everywhere, and that the only thing that might stop it is a thing none of them is strong enough to carry alone.

A story about faith that costs something, evil that argues back, and the small, unreasonable word that holds when everything else gives way: let it be as you say.