Blood of the Exiled

Seven winters have passed since the horror at Blacksteel, and Arnulf has come home to Brossfell a stranger in his own skin. The bite he took in that cursed keep has left him something the hold cannot name and will not meet the eyes of - colder than a living man, stronger than he has any right to be, and gnawed by a hunger no feast will answer.

He means to keep the promise he made as a boy: to find the sister the dark carried east, and bring her home. But the creature that marked him has not forgotten. When Askold walks into the Great Hall with an invitation dressed as a threat - *she is waiting for you, in the city beyond the black water* - Arnulf takes the bait with both hands and sets out east, alone, into a winter that will not end.

The road strips him bare a piece at a time. Through a forest greener and warmer and more wrong than any forest should be. Past the last people ever to show him kindness. Down into a drowned city where the dead rule in the open and the living have learned to kneel - and where the sister he crossed the world to save is waiting with a truth that will break whatever the journey has left of him.

To reach her, Arnulf must become the very thing he swore he never would. Whether anything of the boy who swore that oath is still standing when he does is the only question the dark leaves him.

A harrowing Norse-horror descent of blood-oaths, grief, and the slow loss of innocence, *Blood of the Exiled* is the second book of the Utmark Saga.