What the Thaw Sets Loose: A Secret Even the Snow Couldn't Keep

WHERE THE SNOW CLAIMS GROUND
BOOK FOUR

Elias Mercer has no contract left to protect him, no employer left to answer to, and no way home that does not run through the survey work he destroyed to save a people who never asked him to. What he has is the true field notes against his chest, a leg that fails him more often than it holds, and a woman leading him into country so remote that even her own brother has never walked it. Elder Damiya will not defend them if the syndicate comes looking. She will not turn them out into the cold either. That is the entire deal Elias and Netsuwa Blackwater have to survive on as the last hard freeze of the season gives way to something worse: a spring thaw that turns every frozen crossing, every stable slope, every certainty they had about this ground into a fresh kind of danger.

Somewhere in that thawing country, a set of boot prints they cannot explain keeps crossing their trail, and Netsuwa cannot stop reading a wear pattern in the snow that she has not let herself think about since her cousin Sinaya vanished before this saga's first storm. What she and Elias find at the end of that trail will cost them both something they cannot get back, and it will test, in the space of a single flooded crossing, whether the partnership that has carried them through three books can survive becoming something neither of them has said out loud until now.

Whitfield Coe told Elias he was riding for Sacramento. He did not say when. Somewhere behind them, in country that used to feel too far away to matter, that becomes a lie with a search party attached to it.