In the vein of Naomi Novik’s New York Times bestseller
Spinning Silver and Katherine Arden’s national bestseller The Bear
and the Nightingale, this unforgettable debut— inspired by Hungarian
history and Jewish mythology—follows a young pagan woman with hidden powers and
a one-eyed captain of the Woodsmen as they form an unlikely alliance to thwart
a tyrant.
In her forest-veiled pagan village, Évike is the only woman
without power, making her an outcast clearly abandoned by the gods. The
villagers blame her corrupted bloodline—her father was a Yehuli man, one of the
much-loathed servants of the fanatical king. When soldiers arrive from the Holy
Order of Woodsmen to claim a pagan girl for the king’s blood sacrifice, Évike
is betrayed by her fellow villagers and surrendered.
But when monsters attack the Woodsmen and their captive en
route, slaughtering everyone but Évike and the cold, one-eyed captain, they
have no choice but to rely on each other. Except he’s no ordinary Woodsman—he’s
the disgraced prince, Gáspár Bárány, whose father needs pagan magic to
consolidate his power. Gáspár fears that his cruelly zealous brother plans to
seize the throne and instigate a violent reign that would damn the pagans and
the Yehuli alike. As the son of a reviled foreign queen, Gáspár understands
what it’s like to be an outcast, and he and Évike make a tenuous pact to stop
his brother.
As their mission takes them from the bitter northern tundra
to the smog-choked capital, their mutual loathing slowly turns to affection,
bound by a shared history of alienation and oppression. However, trust can
easily turn to betrayal, and as Évike reconnects with her estranged father and
discovers her own hidden magic, she and Gáspár need to decide whose side
they’re on, and what they’re willing to give up for a nation that never cared
for them at all.
